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How Would I Go About Making a Website Like This One?

Xander562

Xander562

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Apr 2, 2006
1,625
0
Ok so i've suddenly gotten the urge to make a website. So here I am. I've been thinking something along the lines of this. It's a website that some people at my brother's school created. It's called Gossiptron. It has a main paige (the page that displays the gossip). And a Report Gossip page (where people enter in a message, usually gossip, and it shows up on the main page). I was thinking about making a website similar to this for my own school, but with my own twist. I've tried looking at the page source code of both pages but I think there is something missing. Does anyone know how I would go about making a website like this?



P.S. I have got the hosting thing worked out so no need to worry about that.
P.S. I am a uber-noob at this kind of stuff.
 
you could set this up in a Content management system such as Drupal or joomla and have the gossip submitted as comments. anyway you look at this will require some programming knowlage outside of html or css. actually you might be able to do this as a wiki, but then anything would be editable.

I;m able to offer services as a CMS programmer, but as a student this seems more like something you are doing for fun and dont want to pay for.

Look at some CMS tutorials for the 2 I mentioned, or some others and see what you think

:apple:cooper
 
ChicoWeb said:
Intall wordpress in about 5 mintues.
Click to expand...

I second that. I use Wordpress for my blog and I have never had a problem with it (except when Yahoo screwed up my sql db, but that wasn't Wordpress's fault). It has a great spam filter built in and is very customizable. Plus if you have Yahoo hosting your site, you only have to click a couple buttons and fill out a form and they will install it on your site. It can't get much easier than that.
 
PHP/MySQL Basic

What you're trying to make is very simple from a PHP / MySQL standpoint, and would be a good way to learn a little bit about these technologies.

How would you go about learning something like this? Well, for one, you might type "PHP and MySQL" into Google. It'll return, as its top hit, the following website:

http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql

I browed through what this tutorial works through and I can confirm that it will in fact teach you everything you need to know to make your gossip site, assuming the functionality of yours is roughly equivalent to the one you showed us.

Alternatively, you could do as some others suggested and use blogging / content management software, but this would be massive overkill and, in my opinion, more work to customize than just building this yourself.

So what tools will you need to do this? A web host with PHP and MySQL. Approximately how many such hosts exist? About 10 trillion. And to save this forum from another thread about which host to use, the seeming majority of us recommend A Small Orange. Of course, don't forget the Britney Spears of webhosts, Dreamhost (over-sold and out-performed by lesser known alternatives).

In all seriousness, I learned PHP and MySQL by using this technique (learn as you go) and built a much more complicated web application in approximately 20 hours.... an experienced coder could probably write what you're hoping to do in an hour, so expect for it to take a weekend of your time, but won't it be worth it when you come back having built this website yourself?
 
desenso said:
What you're trying to make is very simple from a PHP / MySQL standpoint, and would be a good way to learn a little bit about these technologies.

How would you go about learning something like this? Well, for one, you might type "PHP and MySQL" into Google. It'll return, as its top hit, the following website:

http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql

I browed through what this tutorial works through and I can confirm that it will in fact teach you everything you need to know to make your gossip site, assuming the functionality of yours is roughly equivalent to the one you showed us.

Alternatively, you could do as some others suggested and use blogging / content management software, but this would be massive overkill and, in my opinion, more work to customize than just building this yourself.

So what tools will you need to do this? A web host with PHP and MySQL. Approximately how many such hosts exist? About 10 trillion. And to save this forum from another thread about which host to use, the seeming majority of us recommend A Small Orange. Of course, don't forget the Britney Spears of webhosts, Dreamhost (over-sold and out-performed by lesser known alternatives).

In all seriousness, I learned PHP and MySQL by using this technique (learn as you go) and built a much more complicated web application in approximately 20 hours.... an experienced coder could probably write what you're hoping to do in an hour, so expect for it to take a weekend of your time, but won't it be worth it when you come back having built this website yourself?
Click to expand...
Wow thanks! I'll try this.

As for the hosting thing goes, I'm hosting it myself. (another project that I did when I was bored one weekend.) I figure this will be just about the least-demanding website I could possibly make and that it would be a waste to pay someone to host it. After all, it's mostly just to learn and have fun. :)

But keep the suggestions/advice comming!
 
Use a framework like Cake. It can be done in seconds and require next to no knowledge of PHP/MySQL.

There's unfortunalty alot more to PHP and MySQL than churning out procedural code these days. If you want to learn PHP I can recomend a few decent books. Most of the online content is crap and will teach you how to code, the wrong and backwards way.

Use wordpress it's easier, you can just give people permission to be authors and get them to publish their own content, a fully blown CMS like Joomla will be too clunky for what you want!

Use iWeb if you don't mind updating your roumours your self. Or you could use Google Page Creator.

I would highley recomend WordPress though! It's easy and extensible.
 
Just some basic info:

The HTML you saw when you did a "view source" was written on the fly by a program running on the server, not by a human web designer. Your task is to write the program that lives on the server. The program accepts input from web forms and generates HTML pages based n data from the form and possably from an SQL query into a DBMS.

I've read the comments so far. I agree that your best bet will be to use a web "framework" and not try to re-invent wheels from scratch. Using such a framework you program at ahigher level of abstraction. Ruby on rails is not a bad way to go. If you are going to learn about programming start with something OO (Object Oriented). Before you write the first line of code you need to know the basics of OO design and what is a "class" or a "methd" and how "inheritance" works. Just the basics and then work out a whole system of objects and how they relate to one another.

About databases. They seem simple but they are easy to abuse. 90% of the code out there is horrible and written by people with no formal education in the subject. Doing DBMS correctly takes some study. You should at least know what "normal form" means. Any introduction to data bases will have this.

Anyone with a mac and a broadband internet connection can host a low volume web server. Macs come with all the software you need. And old 1Ghz G4 tower would make the perfect low volume server.
 
WildPalms said:
Better yet, get yourself started in the right direction with a nice OO framework that is 2.0 ready, that will be included in Leopard. You can get this framework now and its very very easy to code in. Just watch the intro 15min movie.

http://www.rubyonrails.org/
Click to expand...

That's great... except Leopard's not out now, and Ruby won't necisarrily bennefit you in the long run, i.e. hosting options and future prospects. Cake aswell as other PHP OOP frameworks do the same thing as Ruby with the advantage of being able to be ported to other hosts and platforms, not putting down Ruby, it's great language and I've tried it, PHP's a little more easier to learn and the syntax is simple and it does support abstact classes, inheritance, encapsulation, type hinting, interfaces, polymorphism and all that other jargon you can find on wikipedia.

You'll need a little more than a mac though, i.e. a domain name, and some dynamic DNS software either on your router or your mac, unless you have/want to shell out for a static IP address.
 
Don't worry about the hosting, I said I've got that figured out and its working for me. :)
 
To those that are suggesting Ruby on Rails or Cake, take a step back and consider whether this is something you'd want a beginning programmer to dive into? Personally, I don't think so.

Yes these frameworks / pure OO languages are great, but IMHO everyone needs to go through the ugly process of doing something like this by hand. If you don't, I think it's a struggle to really understand basic concepts like database modeling, form mechanics, and so on.

That's just my opinion. I'd hate to have tried to dive into RoR without having first slogged though the mysery of hand-coding an ugly, non-DRY PHP/MySQL application myself.

Plus, for something as simple as this, Ruby on Rails would be massive overkill. Sure you can write it in literally fifteen minutes, but it's neither an appropriate use for Rails, nor would it be worth the process of installing / deploying it properly. Again, just my opinion...
 
Agreed, and you have to start somewhere, but if you're going to learn it try and do it the right way, bad habits are a hard thing to get out of once the code "just works" and you never have to come back to it again.
 
I have a script that'll do just this at home (I'm at college now, but I'll be home this weekend). I'll try to remember to post it, or maybe I'll write something tonight at work study.. either way PM me if I haven't posted something by next monday and I'll VNC into my computer at home and get something to you.

However, I wouldn't recommend just using my script unless you have a desire to just throw something up there. Look over it, learn how it works... and then write your own. What I have already written is about as basic as they come. but it'll work if you just want the same sort of thing.

EDIT: Screw this, i'll start in the middle of chem lecture!
 
thejadedmonkey said:
I have a script that'll do just this at home (I'm at college now, but I'll be home this weekend). I'll try to remember to post it, or maybe I'll write something tonight at work study.. either way PM me if I haven't posted something by next monday and I'll VNC into my computer at home and get something to you.

However, I wouldn't recommend just using my script unless you have a desire to just throw something up there. Look over it, learn how it works... and then write your own. What I have already written is about as basic as they come. but it'll work if you just want the same sort of thing.

EDIT: Screw this, i'll start in the middle of chem lecture!
Click to expand...

Haha wow really? Thanks!
 
I second the wordpress for noobs.. its what I use on a few sites, I also love Drupal but its a little beyond the noob... tried Joomla and its beyond me so far..

DD
 
I ran out of time this weekend to write anything really descent, but I did have this lying around which might will do what you want. It's written in PHP and uses a comma seperated value text based file for storage so it should work just about everywhere with almost no editing, but it shouldn't be too hard to convert to an SQL based script.

Obviously, you'll want to change the name and password and whatnot, and if you want the default page to be something besides the default page, you should put the following in the last else statment where it has the list of links.
Code: 
header("Location: guestbook.php?x=view"); /* Redirect browser */

/* Make sure that code below does not get executed when we redirect. */
exit;
Also, I think it's mostly CSS based, so it should be pretty easy to edit... or you can just type in one of the pre-made themes.

and don't use it anywhere it has to do anything critical unless you beef up security.. I did what I could but I don't think it's all that secure, and I'm too much of a n00b to know for sure.
 
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