Going to start coding new site.

airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
edited February 2008 in Internet & Media
Ok.

I am the webmaster for my fraternity. Anyway, our site now looks antiquated and clunky. So I'm doing a visual redesign. But I couldn't just stop there. I started looking at other chapters sites and before I knew it I had come up with an entire new site map. And then pretty soon I had plans for a CMS (chapter management system:tongue:) Things it will manage will be events, attendance, house jobs, mass emails, and lots of other stuff. But I need some guidance.

As far as the databasing goes I'm settled on MySQL as it seems to be the defacto standard (and did I mention free?:D) But here is my dilemma, I am very fluent in Java, and OOP in general. That's what I was taught from the beginning and I can churn it out very quickly. But PHP is procedural, right? I've never done a procedural language except for VB, and we only did that for 2 weeks. Learning the syntax will not be a problem for me.

So my question is should I tough it out and learn procedural programming/PHP or are there any web programming/scripting languages that are OOP? If I do php I guess I'll have to start reading and learning because I'm used to the class/object/method model. It just seems to make so much sense. I fear that a procedural language will be a step backwards.:sad2:

Comments

  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    PHP as of version 5 is very much object oriented.
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    Yeah, you're not going to have any problem using OOP in PHP5.

    I recommend getting your project together piecemeal. Get one or two features working, then make it live. Continue development on another box and add features as they're ready. There is a very high likelihood of burning yourself out and/or missing deadlines if you try to create a big, polished product before you launch.
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    I present to you ... Exhibit A..... ;D
  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    Awesome. Yeh, I have a dev server set up right now, but having a few issues getting the latest version of webmin installed. Missing some dependencies, but other than that I'm almost ready to start. I'll do all my work/testing locally and then ship it out to the web server once I'm satisfied with it.
  • jaredjared College Station, TX Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    Throw up an install of Joomla or Drupal and start hackin'. You'll have a site in no time.
  • airbornflghtairbornflght Houston, TX Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    Nah, not a big fan of joomla. That's what our site is built on now. It just doesn't seem suited to what I want to do. From what I've looked at I'd spend more time interpreting someone else's code and finessing it into doing what I want than just starting off fresh.
  • jaredjared College Station, TX Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    Well I actually prefer Drupal over Joomla. Their CMS is much better and more powerful, but the learning curve is definitely more steep. Might be worth a look however.
  • LincLinc Owner Detroit Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    airbornflght wrote:
    I'd spend more time interpreting someone else's code and finessing it into doing what I want than just starting off fresh.
    You say that now...
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    lol
  • UPSLynxUPSLynx :KAPPA: Redwood City, CA Icrontian
    edited February 2008
    airbornflght wrote:
    From what I've looked at I'd spend more time interpreting someone else's code and finessing it into doing what I want than just starting off fresh.


    From my experiences as freelance web developer, this can be a terrible mistake. Depends really on the quality of the code that was put in place before you. Even then, it can become quite the headache.

    Hope I'm not too late to contribute, but you mentioned you were a Java person. You may want to look into JSP (Java Server Pages) for your scripting needs. Grab Tomcat dev server and play around with it. I've done very little with either one, but I had a friend in college that was a HUGE Java fan and he couldn't stop talking about JSP and server applets.
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