Out of my element - help?

[Jason]

Hello all,

I recently found myself with a web site on my hands. I've owned the domain since 1993, but passed it off to another webmaster in 1997 and it's laid dormant since sometime in 2000. Well, I'm ready to re-launch the site, but I'm totally and utterly shellshocked right now.

You have to realize I've done virtually nothing with web site design since 1997. Back then, basic HTML, basic graphics knowledge, and a working knowledge of Perl was all you needed to run a pretty damned good web site. Now, however, wow, I'm floored.

I know nothing about PHP, but find that to do what I want to do with the site Perl just isn't going to cut it. I can't find *any* scripts at cgi-resources that would allow me to do what I need. I'm flabberghasted.

So - I reach out to this community for help.

I'm trying to set up two sections to the site - one a place where site visitors can come in, create an account, and set up their own blog (and for other site visitors to search and read the blogs created by those who choose to). I don't know how to do that - I know it's possible and I'm sure there are blogging softwares out there that would let me set that up, but as I said I didn't find any at cgi-resources so I'm sure this'd have to be done with PHP and I don't know how or where to begin. Help?

The other section of the site I'm trying to set up is a story archive. I found a couple things at cgi-resources that could work for the job, but nothing that was designed for this purpose really. What I want is for site visitors to submit their own stories to appropriate categories - kind of like a search engine but instead of registering links they'd be registering whole stories, and instead of the search feature returning results that link to other peoples' web sites, it should return results of stories that are in it's database. I'm sure there's something publicly available to do this, too, but I just don't know where to begin.

Can anyone out there help an old dog learn new tricks?

Thanks,

Jason

[dank]

Hotscripts and PHP Resource Index are the two best places I know of to look for PHP scripts:

http://hotscripts.com/
http://php.resourceindex.com/

I would think a variant of guestbook software would handle your first need if you can't find something designed for blogging. A blog is basically just a regularly updated forum thread, best I can tell, so a guestbook for each blogger would probably have the desired result.

A regular link directory ought to work fine for the second item, assuming it is flexible enough to accept a large amount of data (story) per record and does not require the off-site linking aspect. I know Gossamer Threads' Links products can do that with some modification of the database fields and display templates. Also, I don't think it would be too tough to build a custom submission/display/search system in PHP and MySQL. I've put together a number of things like that in the past.

Dan

[Wassercrats]

You could do all that with Perl and CGI too. Don't limit yourself to PHP.

[dank]

Don't limit yourself to PHP.

Restrict or confine, not limit. For anyone but a very well versed Perl programmer, Perl is much more of a limitation than PHP.

Dan