🎮 GameWorld

A PHP/MySQL e-commerce web store for buying and downloading games across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms. Built with vanilla PHP, PDO, and a custom CSS theming system.

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📋 Table of Contents

• Features
• Tech Stack
• Folder Structure
• Setup & Installation
• File Reference
• Database
• Themes
• Notes & TODOs

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✨ Features

• Browse games by platform (PlayStation, Xbox, PC)
• User registration, login, and session management
• Shopping cart (session-based for guests, database-backed for logged-in users)
• Wishlist with add-all-to-cart support
• Blog with category filtering and comment system
• Contact form with email delivery via PHPMailer + Mailtrap SMTP
• Downloadable game client (Astroidinator .exe)
• Switchable CSS themes (Default, Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars)
• Easter egg system tied to active theme

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🛠 Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Backend	PHP (procedural)
Database	MySQL via PDO
Frontend	HTML5, CSS3, vanilla JS
Email	PHPMailer + Mailtrap SMTP
Styling	Custom CSS with theme switching

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📁 Folder Structure

GameWorld/
│
├── index.php                  # Homepage
├── index.html                 # Static HTML reference/prototype
├── database.php               # Root-level DB connection (legacy)
│
├── config/
│   ├── config.php             # Site constants (SITE_NAME, ADMIN_EMAIL, etc.)
│   └── database.php           # PDO connection used throughout the site
│
├── functions/
│   ├── functions.php          # All core business logic functions
│   └── product-display.php    # Product rendering helpers
│
├── includes/
│   ├── header.php             # Sitewide header (nav, session start, DB include)
│   ├── footer.php             # Sitewide footer
│   └── PHPMailer-master/      # PHPMailer library for email sending
│
├── templates/
│   └── product-card.php       # Reusable product card component
│
├── site_functions/            # All routable page files
│   ├── about.php
│   ├── add-blog-post.php
│   ├── blog.php
│   ├── blog-detail.php
│   ├── checkout.php
│   ├── contact.php
│   ├── download.php
│   ├── login.php
│   ├── logout.php
│   ├── product-detail.php
│   ├── products.php
│   ├── register.php
│   └── wishlist.php
│
├── css/
│   └── NewVegas.css           # Main stylesheet (includes all theme variants)
│
├── js/
│   └── main.js                # Frontend JS (cart counters, image gallery, etc.)
│
├── images/
│   ├── products/              # Product cover images
│   ├── background_img/        # Hero/banner images
│   └── characters/            # Easter egg character images
│
├── Astroidinator.exe/         # Source for the downloadable game client
│   └── obj/Debug/
│       └── Astroidinator_SDE2025_Jkra.exe
│
└── contact_messages.txt       # Flat-file backup log of contact form submissions

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⚙️ Setup & Installation

Prerequisites

• PHP 7.4+
• MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB
• A local server stack: XAMPP or Laragon

Steps

1. Clone the repository into your web server's root directory:

   git clone https://github.com/your-username/gameworld.git
   

2. Create the database in phpMyAdmin or via MySQL CLI:

   CREATE DATABASE gameworld CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

3. Import the schema (ask your instructor or team for the .sql dump file).

4. Configure the database connection in config/database.php:

   $host = 'localhost';
   $dbname = 'gameworld';
   $username = 'root';
   $password = '';

5. Configure site constants in config/config.php:

   define('ADMIN_EMAIL', 'your-email@example.com');
   define('SITE_NAME', 'GameWorld');

6. Set up email (optional): The contact form uses Mailtrap for development. Update the SMTP credentials in site_functions/contact.php with your own Mailtrap inbox credentials, or swap in a live SMTP provider for production.

7. Start your server and navigate to http://localhost/gameworld/.

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📄 File Reference

Core Pages (site_functions/)

File	Purpose
index.php	Homepage — hero banner, popular games, platform categories
products.php	Product listing page, filterable by platform/category
product-detail.php	Single product view with image gallery, add to cart/wishlist
checkout.php	Shopping cart with quantity editing and order summary
wishlist.php	User wishlist with add-all-to-cart action
login.php	User login form and authentication
register.php	New user registration
logout.php	Destroys session and redirects to login
about.php	About Us page, content pulled from database
contact.php	Contact form — validates, logs to file, and sends email via PHPMailer
blog.php	Blog listing with category sidebar filter
blog-detail.php	Full blog post with comments section
add-blog-post.php	Form to create new blog posts (currently open access — see TODOs)
download.php	Download page for the Astroidinator game client (.exe)

Templates & Components

File	Purpose
templates/product-card.php	Reusable product card — supports clickable image/title, wishlist or remove button
includes/header.php	Global header: starts session, loads DB + functions, renders nav
includes/footer.php	Global footer with links

Config & Logic

File	Purpose
config/database.php	PDO connection setup
config/config.php	Site-wide constants
functions/functions.php	All helper functions: auth, cart, wishlist, DB queries, sanitization
functions/product-display.php	Product formatting helpers (e.g. formatPrice())

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🗄 Database

The gameworld MySQL database includes the following tables (approximate):

Table	Description
products	Game listings with name, price, images, descriptions, stock
categories	Platform categories (PlayStation, Xbox, PC)
product_images	Additional images per product
users	Registered user accounts (hashed passwords)
cart	Persistent cart items per user
wishlist	Wishlist items per user
blog_posts	Blog post content
blog_comments	Comments linked to blog posts
about_sections	Content blocks for the About Us page
easter_eggs	Theme-specific easter egg quotes and images per product

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🎨 Themes

The site supports three visual themes, switchable via query string:

Theme key	Style
default	Standard dark gaming aesthetic
newvegas	Fallout: New Vegas — retro-futuristic amber, unlocks in-page easter eggs
starwars	Star Wars — space-inspired colour palette

Switch via the header buttons or manually: ?theme=newvegas

The active theme is stored in $_SESSION['theme'] and applied as a CSS class on the <body> tag.

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🗒 Notes & TODOs

• add-blog-post.php is currently accessible to all users. An authentication check should be added to restrict it to admins/moderators.
• product-detail.php and products.php both have a TODO to add publisher, release date, franchise, and developer fields.
• checkout.php has a placeholder checkout button with a humorous alert() — real payment processing is not implemented.
• contact_messages.txt is written to the site_functions/ directory as a backup log. This file should be excluded from version control (add to .gitignore).
• The Mailtrap SMTP credentials in contact.php are for development/sandbox use only. Replace before deploying to production.

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.gitignore Recommendations

contact_messages.txt
config/database.php
Astroidinator.exe/

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GameWorld — SDE2025 Project