I managed to finish a couple of small programming tasks this week that have been on my "todo" list for quite some time. I finally got around to updating the Victoria's Garden Registration Request pages so that they now automatically send email notifications to the customers with their login and password, a task which previously had to be done manually. I took a peek at the victoriasgardenonline.com database today and I was surprised to find a total of over 5,000 records across three different tables.
Now I need to figure out how I can write a couple of utilities using PHP to connect to the MSSQL database on the server. This should be simple. Install PHP on the server, which is already running an IIS web server, and when write the PHP to connect to the local MSSQL database. Well, I was unable to successfully install PHP on the Windows 2000 server, and I am limited in how much I can do because it's a production server and I don't want to screw around with it too much. I would much rather run a second web server using Apache on my Linux box, which is running on the same LAN. I would then need to setup a connection between the Linux server and the MSSQL database on the Win2k Server. Again, I tried this but ran into a few problems. I'll hopefully be able to tackle it again this weekend.