I’ve been busy writing an application and database to store my collection of video games in. It’s finally at a stage where I consider it “complete”. I’ve put my application and my collection of games online here:

http://dev.bencoleman.co.uk/gamedb/

I wrote this for my own personal use, but figured that somebody else might want to make use of it, so I’m releasing it to the world. Note this is not for the non-techie and you’ll need to know a fair bit about PHP, MySQL and so forth to get it running. I’m providing this “as-is” with no support or help (other than the info below) and the code is covered by GPL. If you want to use this I’d be interested so please let me know (out of curiosity really!).

• Download it here - GameDB_App.zip. Once downloaded, unzip and place the gamedb folder in your Apache document root (normally htdocs). Note it doesn’t have to be called gamedb
• The application was written using CakePHP 1.2 (beta). I’m not including this in my download for licensing reasons, but it can be obtained from here http://www.cakephp.org/ Both PHP & MySQL are pre-reqs to using Cake, I used the following versions:
  • Apache 2.2
  • MySQL 5.0.x
  • PHP 5.2.x
• Download & unzip CakePHP, take the cake sub-folder from the main Cake distro and place the contents into the gamedb cake folder (gamedb\cake)
• The app uses some PHP libraries that might not be available by default, these are:
  • GD (see your PHP docs for enabling GD)
  • PEAR HTTP_Client
• MySQL database, create an empty database then use the included SQL script (create_db.sql) to create the tables in it. Edit gamedb\app\config\database.php to point at this DB (host, port, username, password, etc.)
• The system comes with one admin user by default, only this user can add/delete/edit games. Everyone else (anonymous users) can view the system. The username and password of this user is ‘admin’ (no quotes). To change the password create a MD5 hash string of the new password using http://gtools.org/tool/md5-hash-generator/ and replace the value in the users table. I was too lazy to write a proper use admin system seeing as I’d be the only user!
• Using the system should be fairly self explanatory, however special note should be made of the “Wikipedia” button. When adding or editing a game, clicking this button will do a “behind the scenes” AJAX lookup on Wikipedia for the game name, if a match is found the article is scraped for the cover image and the blurb (meta-data), cool eh?
• Images are fetched and stored in the DB, so you enter the URL of the image you want as the game cover, this image URL is fetched only once (assuming the URL is not changed) when the game is saved. This prevents any hot-linking and stealing peoples bandwidth.

Good luck!