Hi everyone, My website needs to become dynamic. As time goes on there are more pages being added and its becoming harder and harder to maunally edit each page to update various navigation bits. My website has a library of downloads but they are on individual html pages. My users cant search for a specific downloads and have to go through the whole library. So PHP and MySql is the way to go, but the only problem is I dont know where to start. How can I make a library of articles that can be searched through by my users? I'm not looking to be spoon fed, but I am looking for a few pointers and tutorial links... any help would be much appreciated.
I would start with a PHP framework. They basically make it easier for you to code, while using less code. PHP is a lot different than HTML. I programmed in C++ and Java before learning PHP. It was not overly difficult for me. I use CodeIgniter as a framework. There are many others that may be better/worse suited for your needs. Look at the framework's documentation to get an idea about what you will be doing. One note about frameworks, choose one with an active forum and clear documentation.
Miikey, I started learning MySQL and PHP just recently as well. They are surprisingly easy, you'd be happy to know, especially MySQL. I leant the fundamentals of MySQL in the space of a day, thanks largely to this resource. Check it out; I'm sure you'll love it. Another resource that was of great help was W3Schools. You should pay that a visit, too. If I were you, I would begin by learning MySQL before moving on to PHP, as you'll be using MySQL commands in your PHP code.
if you want to learn dynamic website, you have to learn a lot. get to start with wordpress. www.wordpress.org .
That looks really good! I just spent 30 minutes watched the demo videos. http://codeigniter.com/tutorials/
Joomla has too many options and takes a lot of time to customize it if it's your first time. Don't know about Drupal.