Book Image

Build Gamified Websites with PHP and jQuery

By : Detrick DeBurr
Book Image

Build Gamified Websites with PHP and jQuery

By: Detrick DeBurr

Overview of this book

Gamification involves the process of leveraging the features of real games into real life. A gamified website has the potential to increase user engagement, ROI, and learning. This book will help you build gamified websites with PHP and jQuery by making you understand the gamification design process to implement game mechanics in practical applications. Gamified websites are very popular amongst Internet users. The gamification of a web content draws users into action to empower them and help them develop new skills. Games engage user attention into the task and each task accomplished will mean the development and enhancement of new skills. This book will help you to apply the essence of games into real word applications such as business and education. Build Gamified Websites with PHP and jQuery aims at empowering and educating the users with an educational gamified website. The book walks through the process of developing a gamified website. Through the course of the book, you will learn gamification development process. The book emphasizes on the application of game mechanics to motivate the user. You will then use the Fogg behaviour model to influence the user behaviour. By the end of the book, you will see yourself building more engaging yet simple websites based on rational principles.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Creating the MySQL database


We need a way to hold all of the information about our players and the system. If we didn't store this information in a logical manner, players would need to keep starting over with our system each time they logged in. This does not make for a good system.

In our environment we opted to use the open source database MySQL. If you installed the WAMP server in the previous chapter, you should already have MySQL installed. Here we will begin using it.

Our WAMP installation includes phpMyAdmin, shown in the following screenshot. This is a tool to create and administer databases directly from a web browser.

We should expect to see the main screen for the PHP Admin tool after clicking on the phpMyAdmin option on the WAMP server menu:

Let's create the main Point database. Click on the Databases menu. Name the database VuPoint and click on Create. You can see our list of databases on the left:

We can find our newly created database in the database list on the left-hand side...