Chinchilla Community Forums
General Chat => Chit Chat => Topic started by: GrayRodent on October 29, 2014, 08:14:55 AM
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I have been learning a lot about website design from many different online sources. Right now I know just enough to be dangerous when it comes to web design but that is changing rapidly.
When I started programming for The Chinchilla Club years ago I basically learned php and sql from scratch. Now I realize there are best practices and very useful ways to make development much more efficient.
My plans at this time is to rebuild everything from the ground up and get it operational, hopefully, by next spring.
I am recommending this resource (https://phpacademy.org/) for anyone who wishes to learn how to program and develop websites from the ground up. The video tutorials are free and if you code and test the code along with the instruction it will accelerate your learning process and as a bonus you have code that works. You can pause the video at any time and go learn about concepts you are unfamiliar with before coming back and starting up again. And you can play with the code and experiment as you go. This is how I'm learning and it's been quite enjoyable. Of course phpacademy is not the only learning resource online. Another very important place is http://www.w3schools.com. If you've never been there go there first and learn about html, css, sql, php, and javascript first.
It is overwhelming at first but it makes more sense when you understand what these technologies are for and how they work together.
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I've made pages just typing out html and javascript in a text document but I decided it's not worth the effort. I don't have enough specialized need to do that instead of a publisher program. Might be different if I could get that stupid roundabout javascript menu to work.
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This site needs tons of custom code and certainly more than I can afford to pay someone else for. Right now it's terribly kludged and woefully obsolete. Not saying it hasn't done it's job in the past and has done well but it's pretty much unmaintainable as it stands. The problem is my web development skills are also kludged and obsolete so they're getting an update first.
So now I'm learning HTML, CSS, PHP, JS, XML, using OOP on an MVC framework with PDO data access. Then there's learning the infamous Apache server routing system that uses regex. It's one thing to learn how to use these technologies but it's another to implement best practices. The good thing is I can learn both at same time. I'm still not yet at a place where I can just start coding but it's getting close. The result will be a website that works well on different sized screens, is easy to maintain code-wise, and we'll be refining our services to make them more user friendly and better organized.