Web development 101

[Bubbs]

I have agreed to build someone a website for a small sum of money, and I may have stretched the truth about my skills a little. My current level is kinda basic, I use dream weaver and am limited to html/CSS.

I agreed to make him a site because its going to push me to learn a bit more about web design, which I find quite interesting.

So with dreamweaver I can make all pages and make it look sleek and very functional, however I have no clue about server side stuff.

So I was hoping for a little guidance

All I want to know is how to get started, e.g creating forms that send the data to me by email, or creating a shopping cart that sends me billing info.. Stuff like that.

Is there a free server that will allow me to practise?

What code will I need to use? I think it's php/MySQL but not 100%?

I'm happy learning from books and the like, just wanted to have a starting point really.

Thanks
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Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

[woodall57]

just use a wordpress template
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cbt:4/7/12 theory:16/7/12 module 1:12/8/12 module 2: ?

[gfrancisdev]

yup php/mysql, both are pretty easy, just keep the php readable and read up on security/ajax requests/etc

email forms are very simple (google is your friend), shopping cart a bit more complicated as it required authentication/things like that, probably lots of ready-made systems you can just paste in though, usually is for this kind of thing

[J.M.]

PHP/MySQL is about it for a basic server side application.

With forms you can do it one of two ways, both decided in the HTML. You can have a POST form or a GET form. This is just the way that the data is sent to the server.

A GET request forms a request like this: example.com/script.php?firstname=john&lastname=doe

A POST request forms a request like this: example.com/script.php

The data in a POST request is invisible to the user (unless they are really looking to find it).

This then affects what you need to do to retrieve the data in PHP.

In the script.php you may have something like this for GET:

[Jayy]

Use a content management system. If you're going to be building websites, Wordpress or Joomla are where it's at.

You can find Wordpress templates ten to the dozen and customise them to your needs if you know html/css.

You can use plugins for forms, galleries, directories etc.

[covent.gardens]

[Rogerborg]

I don't wish to be a dick unnecessarily, but you're now doing this professionally, and the professional way is to farm it out to some Chinese or Indian subcontractor.
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Biking is 1/20th as dangerous as horse riding.
GONE: HN125-8, LF-250B, GPz 305, GPZ 500S, Burgman 400 // RIDING: F650GS (800 twin), Royal Enfield Bullet Electra 500 AVL, Ninja 250R because racebike

[supZ]

you could make a basic site layout with html/css, have a mysql db of products, access it through php and use a google shopping cart or similar for actual purchases.

saves fiddling around with ssl certificates and secure carts etc..

forms have already been dicussed. in ye olde days people used to use perl scripts (a lot of servers still load them as standard) but these days just use whatever scripting language you're using and deal with it that way.

there are plenty of options out there. just look up php mail scripts, form scripts etc..

https://www.w3schools.com/

has some great little examples and tutorials to look at

gl
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CBR954RR - Daily toy
CBR600RR - Trackbike

[oldpink]

for a shopping cart you can use something like OSCommerce its free and easy to set up
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I have become comfortably numb

Theory & hazard 24-may 2016, CBT 8th June 2016, MOD 1 2nd Aug 2016 Mod 2 2nd-Nov 2016 - Current bike CBR 600 RR

[P.]

I'd be throwing a wordpress setup onto a web server for them... get it looking all sparkly It is what I did thanks to some smart monkeys on here

[Boxing]

PHP and MySQL. Easy, if you have the basic grasp of PHP.

Or have loads of time to read up and learn.

Anyway as for security just a case of getting the data and using "mysql_real_escape_string($var);"

Basic form:
index.php:

[Jayy]

[Boxing]

[oldpink]

I use both OSCommerce and Geodesic software

I find OSC pretty easy to use and a lot of custom code freely available for it
we did try Joomla / virtuemart a couple of years ago but I didn't like it as I found it harder to tweak the site / pages the way I wanted to
suppose I'm just stuck in my ways as I've used OSC for over 10 years
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I have become comfortably numb

Theory & hazard 24-may 2016, CBT 8th June 2016, MOD 1 2nd Aug 2016 Mod 2 2nd-Nov 2016 - Current bike CBR 600 RR

[TUG]

[yaigi]

Lots of good advice here about CMS system, using PHP/MySQL etc. so I won't repeat all that, I'll just throw a recommendation for a good shopping cart into the mix, we used this on a couple of sites and it's pretty good!

https://www.cubecart.com/
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What would you do in life, if you knew you could not fail?
Currently own - Fazer 600, 2000, Red. (But no riding as baby on board atm)

[_Will_]

[J.M.]

[ScaredyCat]

Here are a couple of ebooks to help you on your way...

The ultimate beginner's guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL

https://books.openlibra.com/pdf/the-web-book.pdf

Beginning Ajax with PHP

https://it-ebooks.info/go.php?id=1030-1358884411-290fef48667755bc692a2e09a36c4972


Andy
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Honda CBF125 ➝ NC700X
Honda CBF125 ↳ Speed Triple

[Jayy]

[oldpink]

I'll have a look at open cart
I am coming up against restrictions with OSC that are not easily solved
I need multiple shop fronts with one cart, OSC 3 can just about do it but it doesn't support a lot of custom code /DB mods that I have implemented on my V2.3 based site
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I have become comfortably numb

Theory & hazard 24-may 2016, CBT 8th June 2016, MOD 1 2nd Aug 2016 Mod 2 2nd-Nov 2016 - Current bike CBR 600 RR

[Jayy]

Open Cart has the ability to run multiple stores. What problems are you having with OSC?

I used OSC for the better part of 10 years but 2.3 was just being released as I moved away from it. Stuff in 2.2ms2 that should have been out of the box was just missing.

Common one was attribute stock control/quantity. It had no way of tracking stock of attributes and if you have say a clothing company, taking stock of how many sizes have been sold is important.

The fact that most of the contributors were writing poor add ons, instructions in broken English and so on, I just moved well away from it.

I develop 90% in Joomla 2.5 now. Will move to Joomla 3.0 later in the year when more devs update their components/plugins/mods.

[oldpink]

I had various issues like multiple images not working with my bulk uploader
same for an additional fields in the product description not being read from the DB when downloading the info

its becoming too disjointed as most hacks don't take into consideration other commonly used contributions
and having to custom code them into my site to get them to work properly

don't get me wrong its doing the job I want just now but I've reached boundary's that I can not get past (multi store front) without having to resort to almost re writing every page
and as you say no great improvement since 2.2ms2 though 2.3 was a lot better
but just more of a tidy up than new version and 3 isn't supported well enough for me to make the change
as I'd loose a lot of my current features like the custom search that I wrote to include the product extra field data
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I have become comfortably numb

Theory & hazard 24-may 2016, CBT 8th June 2016, MOD 1 2nd Aug 2016 Mod 2 2nd-Nov 2016 - Current bike CBR 600 RR

[Jayy]

Exactly the kind of stuff I would come across and just got fed up of it, especially the contributions not taking in to account other popular ones. You would have to use the likes of Winmerge and compare code and do it like that, taking hours to get multiple hacks working together.

https://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension

Get a fresh install of OC up on your server and try it out, so glad I ditched OSC a few years back.

[oldpink]

will it run on Xampp ??
that was one thing I liked about OSC (lazy c**t can't be assed looking it up)
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I have become comfortably numb

Theory & hazard 24-may 2016, CBT 8th June 2016, MOD 1 2nd Aug 2016 Mod 2 2nd-Nov 2016 - Current bike CBR 600 RR