starting first project

dex3703

Hi,

I posted this on the Newbies board too. Sorry if crossposting is bad here but I wanted some good replies. 🙂

I'm going to be building my first PHP/MySQL website. It's for a class but I would like to keep it afterwards as a demo. My idea is to build an alumni site for my high school, with forums.

I just wanted to ask if there were any caveats, pitfalls, or problems I should watch out for. Is there some mistake you made that you wish you'd known about before? Just looking for any advice anybody can offer.

Thanks,
Derek

drawmack

If it doesn't have to be 100% hand coded, then I would recommend that you get phpbb and look through the hacks on phpbb.com You could set the whole site up in less then a day.

plasmahba

Read something first about register_globals before you start.

www.php.net/register_globals

Good Luck

dex3703

Thanks for the suggestions. the class text has a good discussion about register_globals so I already had some idea of that.

It is a class so I don't think phpbb will be allowed, but I was thinking of using it later, perhaps.

Thanks,
Derek

commandonz

PhpBB rocks, unless you add lots of mods, at which point it becomes harder and harder to apply security patches and make more changes. I use it though, it's pretty dang good, and the community is active and helpful 🙂

Consider using a templating system. I use smarty, it's pretty good. I don't like mixing html and php in one file, coming from a J2EE background.