Website help

[RobDickinson]

Putting together a website for a relative, arg gallery with online shopping/ordering of prints etc. Nothing to complicated. Will be UK based. Sales/hit volumes will be low.



Havnt done a normal/dynamic website for quite some time but have done some Java back end/openLaszlo stuff recently (undr tomcat with myEclipse/mySql).



Website will be simple main page/art gallery/news/about affair with cart, art , news, prices etc from db, updatable from backend app.



So I need a host & a platform/language to develop with. Done delphi before, currently Jade, plenty of Java experience+ orace/sqlsever etc, have VS.net (2003) so asp is in etc.



Looking around most of the cheap hosts seem to offer PHP & mySql, PHP looks ok, any suggestions for hosting and developing PHP?

[zaktoo]

Yes - DON'T! PHP is possibly the world's worst programming language outside of the commercial ones and those written purely for conceptual or obfuscation purposes. You may get away with not having to actually program at all - look at something like Mambo http://www.mambo-foundation.org/ or the other big free software CMS-type thing whose name escapes me right now. _They_ might be written in PHP, but at least you shouldn't need to muck about in actual code yourself if you use them. Also, I personally would avoid MySQL and try to find someone with PostgreSQL. The benefits of having an actual database backend (as opposed to a pseudo-sql frontend onto a flat file data storage system masquerading as a database) is immense. MySQL has certain benefits, but really, the amount of crap you have to code around rather than letting the backend take care of it for you is simply astounding.



My 2 cents' worth of rant over ;-)



HTH



Ciao



Zak



Edit: The other cms-type thing-bobbin is called "Plone". Just remembered ;-)

Edited by zaktoo on Wednesday 23 May 02:38

[RobDickinson]

Ah think I'm going to look at ZenCart because its free, OS and looks like it'll do what I want without much real coding & be managable by the site owner.

[chris.mapey]

May be worth having a look at www.theimagefile.co.uk - they host my photography site.



Really easy to use & upload images etc.



Feel free to email me for more details if you want.



Chris

[Arif110]

I swear by www.photium.com



The dog's undercarriage.