Shared hosting installation + other questions

[pixelDepth]

Hey

I did post a topic with some questions in, but i've posted it in the wrong forum, only just spotted this one :p

http://forums.smartfoxserver.com/viewtopic.php?t=1988

Sorry about that. I can't delete the previous post either.

If the web host does install it, will I be limited to what I can do?

[Lapo]

Hello,
no problem

My main use for SmartFoxServer is to be able to create a chat room for my website. I spotted the simple chat articles, and had a quick glance through them.

By using Flash, SmartFoxServer, and PHP, am I able to create my own chat room application from scratch?

Yep, sure. Maybe PHP is not even necessary, unless you need to talk to a database or so...

I already have membership system in place on my website, will I be able to integrate this into the chat application? So would I be able to have users automatically added into the chat? I'm guessing I would need to use the loadVars object to authenticate the user by connecting to a PHP script and checking in the database?

Ok, I see.

There are 2 ways:

1 - If you use SmartFoxServer Basic you can use PHP to connect to your DB from the client side (Flash) and retrieve all the needed data. We have an article on how to do it. Its' located at chapter 5.13 of the docs

2 - A more secure way is to contact your DB directly on the server side, within SmartFoxServer. This is a better approach as you don't keep the DB related code in the client.
You will need to use SmartFoxServer PRO, which allows to create your server side extensions directly in Actionscript and connect to any database etc...

A lot of informations can be found in our documentation section.

Hope it helps

[pixelDepth]

Thanks Lapo for taking the time to reply.

I'll be sure to look through the documentation

Thanks