[Lemon]

It looks pretty standard to be honest, although there are a couple of questions:
- What does the rank of a user signify that their group doesn't? Is it analogous to the reputation seen on this forum?
- The bans table may be surplus if you have a banned group with zero permissions unless you intend to be able to ban on multiple criteria, in which case having it linked to a specific user may prove frustrating down the line.
- Why is your entire search system and cache in database?

[callumacrae]

Why would you need to report a forum? 0_o

[Renegade]

Uh, private messaging? That's kind of important. Otherwise it looks good, really nice visual representation too!

[SapporoGuy]

Mysql workbench is pretty sweet and pretty much stable if I don't sleep my machine.

[
It looks pretty standard to be honest,
]

not my design, fluxBB's!
I did separate the _data tables since I thought integers and text shouldn't be in the same table. Also thinking of multi-lingual.

[
- What does the rank of a user signify that their group doesn't? Is it analogous to the reputation seen on this forum?
]

Not really, it's more of a standard: noob, regular, bored to death, have no life and admin system.

[
- The bans table may be surplus if you have a banned group with zero permissions unless you intend to be able to ban on multiple criteria, in which case having it linked to a specific user may prove frustrating down the line.
]
Nice! Will take a deeper look at the banning function! Hmmm...

part of the ban table records the message, when the ban expires, the banned and the banner.

[
- Why is your entire search system and cache in database?
]
not sure why they did that but, it could be handy for tag clouds ...

[
report a forum
]

Not really sure why they did that???


I stil need to figure out how to link the reporter versus reported.

[
pm
]
FluxBB doesn't have that out of the box but I agree that is pretty essential!



Are my connections going the right way?
I'm still new to this concept of visualizing 1:1, 1:n, n:1 and n:n

Lol, I'm the old school work it out in code type

[Sephern]

SapporoGuy, on 12 April 2012 - 06:59 AM, said:

Mysql workbench is pretty sweet and pretty much stable if I don't sleep my machine.

[
It looks pretty standard to be honest,
]

not my design, fluxBB's!
I did separate the _data tables since I thought integers and text shouldn't be in the same table. Also thinking of multi-lingual.

[
- What does the rank of a user signify that their group doesn't? Is it analogous to the reputation seen on this forum?
]

Not really, it's more of a standard: noob, regular, bored to death, have no life and admin system.

[
- The bans table may be surplus if you have a banned group with zero permissions unless you intend to be able to ban on multiple criteria, in which case having it linked to a specific user may prove frustrating down the line.
]
Nice! Will take a deeper look at the banning function! Hmmm...

part of the ban table records the message, when the ban expires, the banned and the banner.

[
- Why is your entire search system and cache in database?
]
not sure why they did that but, it could be handy for tag clouds ...

[
report a forum
]

Not really sure why they did that???


I stil need to figure out how to link the reporter versus reported.

[
pm
]
FluxBB doesn't have that out of the box but I agree that is pretty essential!



Are my connections going the right way?
I'm still new to this concept of visualizing 1:1, 1:n, n:1 and n:n

Lol, I'm the old school work it out in code type

Perhaps a better way to visualize the information would be to use an Entity Relationship Diagram. Rather than just describing the tables in your system, it models the entities and relations between them (entities usually end up becoming tables anyway). That way the cardinality constraints (1:1, 1:n, n:1, n:m) can be built into the model much easier.

Assuming that you're going to branch off from this and build your own forum then mapping the entities and going from there might be a better way than just modifying an existing database.

[SapporoGuy]

Hmm, I thought that was what mysql workbench does for you?

I took the existing schema,
opened it workbench,
used the reverse engineer option,
got the above diagram without the lines,
And then went ahead and looked at what column names were linking to which tables.

The lines in the above pdf show the funky connectors that indicated what tupe of relationship exists.

Should I have done this a different way?

[Sephern]

SapporoGuy, on 12 April 2012 - 04:15 PM, said:

Hmm, I thought that was what mysql workbench does for you?

I took the existing schema,
opened it workbench,
used the reverse engineer option,
got the above diagram without the lines,
And then went ahead and looked at what column names were linking to which tables.

The lines in the above pdf show the funky connectors that indicated what tupe of relationship exists.

Should I have done this a different way?

Entity Relationship Diagrams don't have a 1 to 1 correlation necessarily with the actual database. They model the underlying data by splitting it into entities (similar to the process you may do for UML for OO). This tends to be before the data is normalized so the actual database itself can look a bit different.

If you think about the different entities which you want in your forum then you can do an ERD yourself, which you can then normalise into a database. That way you're not reverse engineering someone else's solution which may or may not be suited to yours.

In terms of the actual cardinality constraints you have, not all of them seem to be correct. For example, the permissions to groups would surely be a many to many relationship (a group can have many permissions, for example, a mod can delete and view topics. A permission can be assigned to many groups. For example, both administrators and moderators can delete topics). User Data and Category Data would be one to one relations (a users data belongs to that user, right?). There's probably a few others.

[SapporoGuy]

Wow! Thanks!

At least I'm using workbench!

I agree with your idea about not reverse engineering but I'm planning on giving my work back tonthe flux community if they want it. If not I'll just go from there.

I like that the db is relatively simple and rather feature complete.

I'll spend more time in the cardinalities!

Cheers