Hellllp

Ok. I've been asked to put up a "dating/matchmaking" type site. I've designed a questionaire to fill out and then submit the info.

http://www.caldates.com/questionaire.html

{I'm also experimenting with different background images at
questionaire1.html, 2.html, and 4.html. I don't know what happened to 3)

After the submit button is pushed, i need this to create a new html page )on the fly I suppose) that will be that user's profile which they can later change if they wish. Question? How to get from A to B.

I have it on a host that supports everything (I think) I'll need so I'm not hosting this on a server on my machine. But the more I read, the more confused I get about how to exactly go about it. I just don't want to waste a lot of time reading/studying the wrong thing.

You can use PHP to do what you need. Check out some of the tutorials here and also www.php.net. It is a very easy to understand language designed specifically for the web.

Good Luck,
Joe of 4Life

I'm also going to recommend using MySQL to store all of that information you collected. And as 4Life already mentioned, you'll need PHP to take it from the web form you have, and put it in the database, and vica versa.

Now, not to rain on your parade, but what are you going to offer that other online dating sites don't already? I'm just interested in knowing what you had in mind as I've thought about making one of these kind of sites too because I think learning the matching part would be a good experience, but there are quite a few out there so I just never bothered. I was just wondering if you had a new angle on things.

Actually no. I had a long talk with the person I'm putting the site up for and he's been made aware of the fact that there are several matchmaking sites around and I've looked at most them and they're all pretty much the same thing. One thing he wants to incorporate into it is a chat room. You can see who's online and get into a java chat with them. But other than that, it'll pretty much offer the same info and features as other sites. You can upload your picture which will also appear in the profile, email a person of interest and go from there. Personally, I didn't recommend do it for the same reasons you were reluctant because I doubt seriously if there's any software out there that can truly match two people. They'd probably only even get close by having each person fill out a questionaire that would be book length and I doubt seriously anyone's going to take to take the time to do that.

But I also put up a website for a guy who wanted to sell one R 'n R CD. And the worst part was, he's from the middle east trying sing R 'n R and he's got no voice. Having been a musican also most of my life, I felt obligated to tell him I htought it was pretty awful (in the most diplomatic terms I could come up with under the circumstances) when he played the CD for me. But, having said that, he still wanted to go forward with it and it was his money. I felt I fulfilled my moral commitment so it was fully his decision at that point.

I just need to find some sort of decent tutorials with some examples I can look at to glom onto to point me in the right direction to accomplish this.

In fact I downloaded MySQL and installed it and it crashed my machine when I shut down windows so I'm hoping I can learn to code this mess and just test it on the host's server. But I'm so in the dark at this point, I'm not sure where to go first. That's why I posted here on recommendation from another forum.

lavalife.com's got that covered. But if it's a client, who are you to argue?

Best tutorials are on here (devshed) and phpbuilder.com as well. And of course the manauls, particularly the user notes in the php manual -- they get you around those little wierd things that come up. Search the forums too, lots of code around here. And of course, when you get stuck, well, that's what the forums are for.

Great. I'll check out that chat and scrounge around here for tus as well. Thanks much.