Where to start?

[Cyote101]

Well, first off i'm new to the forum and webcodeing all together. I would like to thank everyone in advance for their help and guidance.


So, here is my question. Recently i decided to make a website. It is going to be a hobby site, for photography. I do not know if something like this exists and thought i would ask the question here.

I would like to make a website, sort of a search engine type site. Basically people can register with the site for free, and add additional links to the site. There will be a special form to allow users to do this. people can choose what type of link they are adding, whether an article, Image,Video,Site etc. these would be chosen from a drop down menu. the user would then write a brief description for this link, add the tags they think are appropriate and submit it to the Admin to approve and add to the DB.

Now this site is a search engine, or what ever you want to call it. anyone can come to this website and use the search engine, with or without registration. I would like to have two or three view settings for the search results to be displayed. such as thumbnails, with or without the url etc. i would also like a "URL Access" setting page or section that would allow the user to choose what happens when a result is clicked. If it opens to the website address or if the URL object gets displayed in a new window by itself, with an additional option to goto the website.

I would also like to know what it would take to

1. search other search engines, and then edit the tags, descriptions etc as an admin and then submit those to the Webite's DB

2. similar to 1 above but i would like to be able to target a specific site or sites for search or crawling.

Another thing is each user would also be able to edit or modify the tags for the search results.

So that is an outline for the website i want to make, I don't even know where to start so any pointers would be awesome.

[gnomeontherun]

Well for a beginner you might be looking at something too ambitious here. When I started to code I thought that I could make a better chat client than Yahoos, but then I quickly realized there was a lot more to everything.

You have some options though. I don't suggest hand coding unless you really want to learn it all and have the time. If that is your goal, then please advise. Otherwise check out some CMSs, many of which has this feature built in by default or something close to it. I use Joomla, others say Drupal, still others say Wordpress, and even more say a lot of other options. I don't know what will be best for you, but http://www.opensourcecms.com/ is a website that you can test many systems without downloading and installing them yourself.

That being said, using a CMS also has a learning curve and can often require coding knowledge. I think its important to be realistic in your goals and in what you can do. I don't know what you can do, but if you are not familiar with what a DOCTYPE is, then I can say you are shooting too high. It takes time to develop the basic skills, so work on them and in fact get a book. There are several ones out there, just look at ratings on Amazon. If you know what a DOCTYPE is and are laughing at me for using it as my measure of coding knowledge, then perhaps you've been working enough with coding to handle the CMS. Again, I don't know, but you need to assess your skill level closely before tackling such a project.

[jerry62704]

Jeremy, Joomla isn't something that I'm familiar with. I did have a forum on my web page (provided by the host) that I shut down after getting 50-70 porn links a day. The Captcha didn't seem to slow them down at all.

Does Joomla handle that kind of crap?

[gnomeontherun]

It can, depending on what exactly you want or need it to do. Right now there is sort of a forum vacuum in Joomla, the old primarily used one is discontinued but a fork is being released soon. There are some bridges between SMF and phpBB too, but Joomla doesn't have a native forum system, its all extensions.

If you just want a forum, then use a forum not Joomla. Joomla is best when you need more functionality.

Hows our new governor by the way?

[jerry62704]

The day the guy came out and scrapped Blago's name from the door (I work for the state), everyone out there started clapping. The guy was kind of embarrassed to have all the attention.

Quinn seems to be doing the right things so far. He refused to have his name on every state door, highway, etc. I was shocked to see a governor that wasn't trying to get his name on everything under the sun.

But Blagojevich was so unpopular that anyone after him would seem a relief.