Dynamic Site Newbie

[Guy_Davies]

First off I just want to say hi to everyone as I am new here (just seems polite) so... HI! 😃

I have been learning to design sites for some time now and have started to get to grips with static site creation and now look to move on to dynamic site creation using PHP and MySQL.

My first project is going to be my own personal/company site, just like most people 'own' sites I want mine to contain features such as a homepage, news section, portfolio, contact page etc...

Being new to the world of dynamic sites I am not really sure how all these elements will be strung together. I need to make an admin section for my site where I can input my latest news events and portfolio entries.

I need to know how all this would work ie. what elements I need to plan for the project to work. I have read up on a few things and have come up with the idea of having...

My main url (www.mysite.co.uk)
My admin sub-domain (admin.mysite.co.uk)

Within the admin section I would like to be able to manage all my news articles and portfolio section. I think this would all be managed by using one database(?) and using different tables for each section(?) i.e. a news table, portfolio table etc...

This is very long winded message I know but I need to get the basics right before I waste vital development time my heading in the complete wrong direction. If anyone can make sense of what I am trying to get at here then I would greatly appreciate some feedback to this post.

[kkobashi]

Rather than building it from scratch, you can try the various content management systems (CMS) out there.

Look at Drupal (www.drupal.org). It will likely serve all your needs. It will take some time to play with and understand, but will beat re-inventing the wheel. Besides, it sounds like your expertise and time would be better spent on your job, rather than writing PHP code to build CMS'.

[reflash]

Another good place to look is [url]http://www.hotscripts.com,[/url] if you don't want to spend a lot of money (or any at all). It's a great place to get free scripts that you can take apart & see how others do things. Then you can either DIY, or just use their scripts.

Taking this approach, however, will require you to do some coding & database work, as most of the scripts that I have seen there assume that you will be using a db that is laid out according to their parameters.

Good Luck!