How long it will take to write a big website in PHP. I know basic PHP. I am going to study more to design a site.
I am currently on my 7th day of my website's design and as a beginner, it took me more than 24 hours to finish a registration page which requires a php script that insert the information into the database.
PHP is an easy language if you have prior digging skills with C/C++ . By the way , installing PHP script and configuring Mysql and database is not a big thing , but writing large websites /scripts/forums you need some kind of experience .
Depends on how dynamic the site will be If your writing an entire CMS complete with user registration, a plugin layer and all, it will take some time ( I have been trying to perfect mine for about a year, with time off here and there ). Mind you, its written from scratch but its like a hybrid mixture of Joomla and Wordpress. I wouldn't say I'm an expert, I have areas where I am weak in PHP and other areas that I am extremely familiar. I could code certain pieces of the CMS fine, nice and fast, but for others I had to refer back to the manual and take some time to learn better methods of doing certain tasks. Get used to refering back to the manual. If you are just building a site from scratch and integrating small scripts like news managing, user comments, that probably won't take long I could probably do a news script in half a day with user commenting ). Most importantly, if you're new, don't try to dig too deep for a production site. Install PHP, MySql, Apache on your computer and work on writing applications using different techniques, finding your best way in and out of various tasks. I've found that just writing small random scripts helped me learn arrays and various other aspects of the language to make things go by extremely fast and helps you better understand how to really use PHP to get things done effectively.
How much big the website is? I can suggest you the simple way of coding break the big website into parts and then start coding. All over it depends on your programming speed