Movies

The primary reasons for my initial boba.org were to check if I already owned a movie before buying its DVD from the bargain bin and to be able to update only one thing but have the latest information available no matter what device or Internet connection I was on. In other words, no need to keep an updated copy on any/every device I might use.

I made a few attempts at learning to insert code into WP pages and didn’t get satisfactory results. Just recently I tried again and looked for suitable WordPress plugins instead of inserting my own code.

I found wpDataTables and can now present the movie lists in easy to use and much more attractive tables.

WordPress works quite well on multiple devices and adjusts the web page and table display for the device’s screen. The old site is cumbersome with no automated display detection or output reformatting for the display size/type.

Filtering is easy but coarse in this limited (free) version of wpDataTables. Search can’t be limited by column. To list all “PG” movies, put that in the search. It returns “PG”, “PG-13”, and any movies that have the letters “pg” in the title or Genre(s). So, a “PG” search will find more than only PG rated movies.

The movies lists let me conveniently check to see if I have a movie or not, then see if it’s on the list of movies I’m still looking for and then decide whether to buy the DVD.

Adding a movie to the database and setting its status to want, changing a movie’s status from want to have, correcting or modifying any other details about a movie updates a single MySQL database. On the old web pages, a page refresh would display the new information from the database. With this new method using the free version of wpDataTables, after the database update, the new info must be exported in a text file then that file has to replace the one these new tables refer to.

The movies database doesn’t get updated frequently so the extra steps aren’t much of a burden.