Aight, I am so fed up with it, i now looked at a half dozen PHP/mySQL scripts that were sure great for managing DVD, stamp or record collections but a nightmare from the database design. So in a nutshell i found it easier to make something completely from scratch than customizing these other solutions.
For a starter i made some simple includes for the most basic HTML and database access and some simple forms.
After a while i noticed that The biggest mistake of all these DVD-collection type scripts is that they made some rather bad database design and built php forms around it. That sucks so much if you notice like "Ah i forgot CPU family" or "Hmmm, it would be nice for a filter to have "Supports VGA resolution as a boolean", so instead of building forms around the database design i just directly use the database layout, meaning i just spit out all database columns and then populate them with the query. That is actually lightyears better than constantly updating your HTML for the forms whenever you add/rename/delete a column. Adding/modifying/deleting a column on-the-fly might be a bit risky for novice users, but i think most people who are dangerously enough to set-up a mySQL database know what they are doing (at least i do), so for me it's been a big advantage to add or delete a column with a mouseclick on a php website, no more constantly switching to phpMyAdmin and back to the php editor. For most sane uses there's only 3-4 datatypes anyways.
Well but these DVD-collection solutions also had some good approaches, so throwing some configuration into a database makes it more flexible and less editing config files.
Right now it's all pure PHP and raw SQl statements, so a security nightmare, but once i have finished the basic skeleton i wanna use PDO prepared statemnts or stored procedures, throw all admin stuff in a protected area, run all selects with DB_reader user and add some more security.
I'll keep it simple as i always do so my computer list will stay Internet Explorer 2.0 compatible and will work on a shared 5 dollar (or free) hosting if you have mysql and php. However, if anyone else is interested i can give out sources for free once i finished the basic stuff. Just let me know if there's any interest...