Hello, and need some guidance

[mjrzasa]

First, hello everyone, I have been thinking lately of joining a forum to get some help with my webdesign problems and searched and found this today. I hope to learn a lot here and hope I can help others too.

Now, what I'm working on is a website that is very simple and simply structured, menus or links on each side. Down the middle of the website I want there to be a text input box where people can post things and have a few options (drop down menus) to select a category that applies to the post. I expect all comments in that field to be a sentence or two. After they have clicked enter to submit their comment, I want it (and past other comments) to show up underneath the empty comment box. Something like a blog setup, I think.

I'm just wondering how I can get this stuff going. I know how to set up a text field box and submit button, but it pretty much ends there for me. I don't know how to make hitting the submit button - to get it to post it anywhere.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, this is a website I would like to get going as it would be fun with my friends and a nice portfolio piece.

 

[conor]

Sounds like you need to use a programming language. WIth PHP, for example, you can do all of that. You can, in conjunction with a database to store the posts, use PHP to display posts by category etc. I'd advise you to look up some PHP tutorials on this kind of thing.

If your not interested in learning programming there are plenty of ready to go systems you can use to achieve this like wordpress or nearly any content management system out there.

 

[victor02]

One of the basics of web designing is HTML you should first master HTML before heading to other web programming.

 

[Edge]

Wordpress would very quickly get you close to where you want to be and doesn't have too bad a learning curve. In tandem with using it you would also need to start beefing up your html/css and PHP skills.

 

[mjrzasa]

Thanks for the replies. I do know the basic HTML/CSS. I do not want to resort to using WordPress because, as I understand, it does not allow you full customization of the page as using you own HTML and CSS would.

But the thing that confuses me is when I look for PHP tutorials (and any other language tutorials) they always start off with "Hello World" stuff, and while I understand that is the basics and to learn the variables etc, I am trying to find a more direct route to knowing and understanding, then utilizing the PHP or whatever it might be, to get what I'm looking for. If anyone could give me some recommendations to something like that I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks again.

 

[ronaldroe]

Couldn't you just use Twitter/Facebook/Myspace/etc...?

I mean, I guess if you really want something of your own, you could just check out Disqus

 

[gratiela]

If you want something like a blog, just use Wordpress. It can be customized in any way you want, plus there are a lot of themes, free and premium to choose from and countless tutorials on how to customize it. This is probably the easiest way to achieve what you want.