Can I make this website or is it too ambitious? I know nothing.

Justice

So my Windows touch gaming thread fell flat. No surprise; this is really a console-and-KBAM forum. But the demand is out there; for a couple years now, I've been finding dead internet threads where people attempted to catalogue touch and stylus compatible games for Windows tablets. So maybe someone should make a website.

How hard would it be to make a website with the following:

• Stores data in a simple table / db.
• Displays said data in a table.
• Allows visitor to sort the table by a selected column. (Columns would be name, touch or stylus, metacritic, steam score, notes, thumbs up or down.)
• Allows visitor to click the thumbs up/down (meaning, "yes this worked for me" / "no it didn't") and records the tally, preferably allowing only one click per game per IP. This would be the only "dynamic" part of the website.
• Allows visitor to submit a form with game and notes information (which could just be an email to me, doesn't need to dynamically update the db).

My wife hosts a page on a dreamhost account, so I could add another domain to that and use whatever tools are built into dreamhost. Is this something I could kludge together with prefab components? Or would this require actual knowledge and programming? I'm generally computer literate and can learn most things, but I haven't touched websites or CGI stuff since 2002. Also, after having made a brief foray into programming recently, I don't think I want to make that kind of effort again. Programming is hard.

The alternative to this is a wiki, I guess. I assume they have canned wikis? Or should I just start something on wikia or whatever? Wikia seems to have decent search engine visibility...

Feral

I wouldn't call this terribly ambitious as long as you stick to the scope as described.

Choice of platform depends a lot on how fancy you want to make it and how much programming you can stomach.

An easy barebones method would be to use MediaWiki. Almost everything you describe is available out of the box, and the interface is similar to Wikipedia so it should feel familiar. You'd need to add an extension for upvoting/downvoting, but there are several available: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?search=voting

Also, Dreamhost directly supports Mediawiki: https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/217292577-MediaWiki-overview

If I were doing it, I'd probably build it in Drupal, but don't just assume that Drupal would be right for you. To make Drupal sing you really have to dive into it, and getting a little dirty with coding in PHP helps a lot.

Grunt's Ghosts

You might be able to find something through Squarespace which is how many people I know make websites. Not sure how much control they give you as it seems to be a plug and play type thing but maybe they have advance options for those who know how to program.

Enc

Squarespace is kinda wonky and requires some upcharge stuff. Wix, Wordpress, and Goggle sites can be cheaper if you are't looking to invest heavily. All three have various levels of usability (Wix is drag and drop but may be too limiting for output for your needs, Google sites can be fully edited but you need CSS/HTML knowledge otherwise it's easy options are kind of crappy. Wordpress has a nice balance (and is what I use for my map resource database) and allows you to pick from thousands of free and paid themes to get you started.

I've never paid for a theme and been able to build a number of solid websites through wordpress, that would be my recommendationif you want something non-wiki. That said, mediawiki probably serves your needs better.

Smrtnik

Have you looked at Atlassian Confluence?

zepherin

This sounds a lot like google sheets. Have you considered just popping it up as a spreadsheet?

Feral

I love Atlassian Confluence but it isn't free, and it's really geared more towards sharing knowledge between trusted users (like, coworkers in a company) and not so much towards a public wiki. Maybe there's a way to make it work as a public wiki that I just don't know about.

Google Sheets is a great idea tho.

Justice

You guys are great, thanks for the suggestions. Based on these, I'm looking at google sheets, google scripting, and the scripting UI. Wordpress seems relatively accessible, but googling hasn't turned up any obvious solution to pull data into a displayed, dynamic table and let users push data back into the underlying database. Mediawiki seems like the best solution if I knew what I was doing; the documentation kind of assumes you've been there for a while. For example, the DataTable2 extension summarizes itself this way: "The DataTable2 extension is conceptually the converse of the basic idea of Semantic MediaWiki extension and similar approaches." Uh... good?

Feral

Justice wrote: »

You guys are great, thanks for the suggestions. Based on these, I'm looking at google sheets, google scripting, and the scripting UI. Wordpress seems relatively accessible, but googling hasn't turned up any obvious solution to pull data into a displayed, dynamic table and let users push data back into the underlying database.

This can easily turn into one of those holy wars, kind of like Apple vs. Windows or Xbox vs. Playstation, where there are a lot of strong opinions and no right answers.

Personally, I really don't like Wordpress for database-driven web projects with custom data types like what you're doing. You can make Wordpress work for that and there are lots of very good add-ons for it, and I've built some relatively complex sites with it, but to me it always feels a little kludgy.

One of Wordpress's largest competitors is Drupal and it was built for sites exactly like what you describe. But as I said above, Drupal can be a bit overwhelming at first and you'd ideally need to be comfortable monkeying with PHP code a little bit. It is probably overkill for your project.

It sounds like Google Sheets is going to work for you though so