My plans for a complete redesign of this site are still on the backburner for now as I wait patiently for my current hosting plan to run out, but that doesn’t mean I’ve completely abandoned all personal projects. My latest goal has been to produce a database driven website for the Young Marrieds group at my church. I want to create a site that will allow each couple to maintain personal info for the other young marrieds to see, and provide a central place to post news and events. For the news and events side of the site, I’m relying on blogger. I would have used the code I created for this blog, but blogger will make it much easier for the not so tech-savvvy folks to get in on the action. Blogger also helps because I can start with a basic css layout from the templates section rather than creating a design from scratch while I’m trying to work out the database of the site. For the whole database/user authentication/content management thing I’m starting from scratch with a custom php/MySQL solution. To see where I’m at so far, goto http://youngmarrieds.jasongraphix.com. It’s been a while since I’ve done any of this, so right now I’m just taking baby steps. These may not be the accepted programming way of doing things, but the necessary steps that I see in getting this bird up in the air. Remember: I am not a programmer.
- Step 1: Plan out the relational database.
- Step 2: Plan out how I want to display the information on the pages.
- Step 3: Create pages for users to create/update their couple profiles – and if they are admin, allow them to edit group information.
- Step 4: Secure all pages that are not public access with a user authentication system.
- Step 5: Create pages to query the database by useful search strings.