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 movie list but have the latest list available no matter what device or Internet connection I was on. No more coping the latest version of the list to any device it might be needed on. And the project provided experience setting up a web server, web site, and database backend.

The original boba.org has links to “Movies I Have” and “Movies I Want” which use PHP and MySQL to build the tables presented on the web pages. Adding movies to the underlying MySQL database, changing a movie’s status from “want” to “have”, or making any other changes to a movie and then using either Movies link builds a new table for the web page which reflects the latest database changes.

When boba.org migrated to wp.boba.org it went from hand coded to WordPress. I made a few attempts at learning to insert code into WP pages and didn’t get satisfactory results. As a result my Movies lists weren’t available on this WP site. I tried again recently to get the Movies lists on this site. I looked for a suitable WordPress plugin this time instead of trying to insert 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 for the device’s screen size. 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). A “PG” search will find more than only PG rated movies.

These movie lists let me conveniently check to see if I have a movie, 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.

Using the free version of wpDataTables, after the database update the new info must be exported to text files and the new files replace the text files that the tables on this page refer to. Then the links between the tables and the text files have to be refreshed for the tables on the web page to show the updates. A page refresh won’t do it.

The export and replace steps are done manually at present. The link refreshes happen automatically on a schedule. Instructions for link refresh are part of the wpDataTables help and they work in the free version.

The movies database doesn’t get updated frequently so the manual export and file replace steps aren’t much effort. I am reading documentation and other sources to make the export and replace automated as well. Ideally it will be triggered by database updates so the steps are run only when needed otherwise it will run on a schedule, probably daily.