Re: PHP noobie

Bob Stia wrote:

Hello PHP list First allow me to apologize if this is the wrong place for this and direct me to the proper place. (be nice now!) I know nothing about PHP and have read at least 100 faqs and googled for hours. I don't even know some of the basics.

The fact that you've searched before coming here puts you above 99% of the 'newbies'.

Allow me to explain. I am the webmaster for a small web site for a Florida car club. The members have been asking if they could post info about events, communicate community wide, maybe post their own Classified ads, etc, I would like to comply with their wishes for an email/blog kind of thing but don't have the foggiest notion where to begin. The googling/faq's don't help me a bit and appears to be pretty complicated. I don't even know the basics. I really have no desire to go into a steep learning curve to accomplish what should be a pretty simple thing. I need simple and easy.

There are plenty of pre-built packages out there. Look at places like HotScripts.com and php.resourceindex.com

I have composed in straight html (not that much,but enough) and with several GUI's. (all open source Linux based) I compose on my system and then simply upload to the site with FTP. I have found a few PHP packages but are not sure what they do. They require PHP, MySQL or Postgres, and Apache. Do I really need to install Apache? (The site is hosted by a commercial remote ISP as a courtesy/good will thing and I think they support PHP but do not wish to place any burden on them to support the site) Do I really need a data base?

Unless you build the app(s) yourself, you're at the mercy of the developers at to what is required to run the software. Most of these pre-built packages are pretty easy to install though and you can do it without the knowledge of PHP, MySQL, etc. Chances are, if your ISP is running some flavor of *nix for it's web servers, they already have Apache, PHP, and MySQL installed. -- John C. Nichel ÜberGeek KegWorks.com 716.856.9675 john@kegworks.com