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Design-stage advice and opinions welcomed

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

Followups directed to: comp.lang.php

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Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am tasked with creating a web-site for my local University of the Third 
Age (U3A) and am at the design-stage at present. The HTML and CSS are no 
problem and I have experience in coding a previous dynamic site using PHP/
MySQL. This post is cross-posted to c.d.mysql and c.l.php, both of which 
groups I have been active in (off and on) for some years. So I am NOT 
askimg you to do my homework :) I've set follow-up to the php group.

So far, I've neither created the database nor written a line of php code, 
I'm seeking advice/opinions before I start so as to avoid time-wasting 
mistakes in design. I'd be grateful for any comments on the ideas below.

DATABASE:

At the moment there are 20 groups meeting at various venues at various 
dates and times which people need to know. Each group has a convener, 
people need to know his/her contact details too.

So for each group (typically they meet twice a month) I am thinking about 
the following 9 'columns'

autoincremented number
name
time of meeting
date of 1st meeting e.g. 'first tuesday'
ditto second
venue
convener
telephone of conv.
email of conv.

Some conveners chair two or more groups and more than one group may meet 
at any one venue.

I'm thinking I need at least three tables:

groups
venues
conveners

Is that enough normalization? I realize it's not fully normalized as more 
than one group may meet on the first Tuesday of the month but a table of 
dates seems to be over-egging the pudding? nobody is going to change the 
name of a day to the week?! opinions?

PHP:

I am delightedly discovering the wonderfully versatile strtotime function 
which will simplify matters no end, so long as I store correct syntax in 
the database e.g. 'first Tuesday' rather than '1st tuesday' etc. Also, 
'of this month', 'of next/second month' and 'of third month' are going to 
be REALLY useful. Very cool!

Most of the php will be pretty straightforward - producing a list of 
meeting dates and times for a group (drop-down list of group populated 
from the groups table, etc). The challenge will be producing a complete 
dynamic 'diary' page where the next 100 day's meetings are listed in 
datetime order. I think I'll need a for or while loop but how do I avoid 
querying the database once or twice on each iteration??? Again I'm not 
asking for code but principles to work to, to avoid wasting resources.

Anyway, that's more than enough for the present. If you've read this far 
then thanks for your patience. Feel free to comment on any or all of it.

Thanks again,

Derek

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Design-stage advice and opinions welcomed Derek Turner <frderek@suremail.je> - 2015-09-24 10:35 +0000
  Re: Design-stage advice and opinions welcomed Derek Turner <frderek@suremail.je> - 2015-09-24 10:46 +0000
  Re: Design-stage advice and opinions welcomed The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2015-09-24 15:46 +0100
  Re: Design-stage advice and opinions welcomed Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2015-09-24 22:58 +0200
  Re: Design-stage advice and opinions welcomed Geoff Muldoon <geoff.muldoon@trap.gmail.com> - 2015-09-25 10:57 +1000

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