Total Newb needing some general design guidance

[sailors1112]

Hello everyone!

 

I would first like to openly state that I am a total NEWB when it comes to using PHP and MySQL. In fact, I have just started learning how to use PHP/MySQL in order to design a website for teaching ESL (teaching english as a foreign language).

 

Anyway, my problem is this: I have a vision for what the finished website should look like, but I am unsure of what TOOLS (ie: kind of code) would be best to further investigate to use in the creation of my website. I've started reading several different kind of books, but I'm still not sure what kind of PHP or combination of PHP/MySQL, etc, that I actually need to learn.

 

Essentially, the website is going to be a collection of lesson plans. I want the lesson plans to be searchable, so that if you typed "holidays" into the search box, all the lessons associated with "holidays" would appear. I am thinking of something very close to what Amazon.com uses - you search, then you get several previews which can be organized by rating, and when you click on one it takes you to the full details of the lesson plan.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions for what framework I need to be using? Or does anybody know any premade script that's out there that I can modify?

 

I haven't been involved in webbuilding since HTML, so I'm terribly behind the curve @_@

 

Please point me in the right direction so that I don't waste hours of time figuring out things that I won't be able to use!

 

Thank you very much in advance!

 

(This is what I've put together so far... I really don't know where to go from here. Normally, I would build a static HTML page for each lesson, but I want something more user-controlled, plus, I have hundreds of lesson plans.

 

http://eigobento.com/layoutrecovery.html)

[KevinM1]

I don't know if there's any pre-made scripts out there for this sort of thing.  I wouldn't be surprised if there were, so you should check Google if you don't feel like taking the plunge of doing it all yourself.

 

If you do feel like getting your hands dirty, you'll need both a database and server side scripting language.  Since you're here, the defaults would be PHP and MySQL.

 

You don't necessarily need a framework.  While frameworks are indeed powerful, they're at least an extra layer of learning on top of PHP and MySQL, usually two - you'd have to learn both the framework itself and most likely basic Object Oriented Programming theory and technique.  The easiest ones to learn are most likely Code Igniter and Kohana.

 

Regardless of what technology you use to build the site, the most important aspect will be your database design and domain model - how things are stored in the db, how they're retrieved, how they interact, how they should be used etc.  You'll need to figure out what constitutes a lesson plan, how plans should be grouped and/or related, and the extent to which a user can interact or modify them.  Start with database normalization (http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/intro-to-normalization.html).

 

As a general design tip, you wouldn't be storing raw HTML pages of lesson plans in your db.  Rather, you would store lesson plan data (notes, corresponding assignments, anything else relevant), and then display that data in a template, which would be mostly HTML, with just enough PHP code to echo the data in the right spots in your layout.

 

Hope this helps.