I have a great idea but no experience =(

[leggomygreggo]

Hello everyone. I have this great idea for a site but i have no idea where to start. Please, any help would be absolutely amazing.

Ok, so basically I'm making a rating site for a game that I play. In this game players can battle each other. What i want to happen is for me to able to collect these wins and losses so that people can see who is the best at the game.

On this site I want people to be able to register and have their own accounts so that they can log on and see their current ratings. I also want to be able to set certain peoples accounts to an admin status so they can moderate the site. The main function of an admin will be to start tournaments in which users that are logged on can sign up for and get rating points.

This is how the tournament thing is gonna work. After the set amount of people have signed up, they will go do their thing in the game and come back to the site and report if they won or lost. Since this is gonna be on the honor system, each matchup will have to report the same thing, ie. player 1 will report that he won 2-1, and player 2 will report that he lost 1-2 so that they check themselves and we dont have any disputes. This will happen after each round, just like a real tournament. And after each round a formula that i will provide later will be used to calculate the gain/loss of rating points. At the end of the tournament the win/loss of rating points will be totaled and then each players account be updated with the results.

Ok so as for individual user accounts, like they log on and then on maybe the left side it displays the different rating categories. The user can then click on each of the categories and it displays their progress, like it shows each tournament they have entered and each round, who they played against, and how many points they gained/lost.

So now that we have the how the rating system is going to work, time to put that thing to work. I want what is called a ladder. Basically the top people get on the ladder (its a top 10 i guess)
I want the "ladder" to be updated everytime there is a rating change. So for example...
Player 1 has a rating of 1500, player 2 has a rating of 1450, and player 3 has a rating of 1430. So lets say that player 3 just got done with a tournament and he gained 11 points. Well as it is now, player 2 is ahead of player 3. As soon as he gets those 11 points he will then be ahead of player 2 and thus would move up on the ladder. I know, sounds complicated.

Well thats the basic gist of the site i want to create. Input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
PS..im not sure if all of this can be done in HTML, so if someone could tell me what this needs to be programmed in so i can start learning that, that would be very helpful.

[saltedm8]

i dont think that is possible in html, but you might have better luck in the PHP Forum ( sorry, but thats out of my area )

[thomkhat]

There are a lot of technologies that can do what you are suggesting. Personally, I would recommend PHP for the pages themselves, as it supports full programming features that HTML does not. There are others that will do it too, but PHP is free, and there are a lot of other webmasters out there using it, so if you ever decide to sell your site, it's more likely to sell with PHP code than if you used some other, less popular language. It also sounds like you need a database backend for things like storing user login info and the other data. MySQL is a great companion for PHP. Finally, you might want to look into some freely available Content Management Systems (CMS) that can automate some of what you are looking for, such as the user management and user mod/admin functions. Good luck, you have a long but interesting road ahead of you.

[moojoo]

PHP, MySQL, Textpattern... Oh Yes. I even installed textpattern locally on my Macbook pro and I use it as a task manager/thought manager. very spiffy indeed.