Newbie question

Someone told me about this board and I thought it would be the perfect spot to ask. I'm so new to this stuff I didn't even know which forum to post the question in so if it needs to be moved to a more appropriate forum, please feel free.

Ok. Here's the deal. I'm pretty comfortable with designing sites with HTML and all. But a friend of mine wants me to help put together a site that's going to have (*shudder*) forms.

Well, I'm using Dreamweaver Ultradev, so I can put the forms together alright but I need a general (or better yet specific) roadmap to work this out. Here's what I need to do exactly.

A new member signs onto the site (with logon and password, etc.) and then fills out an extensive questionaire which becomes the member's profile (it would create an html page on the fly with all the info harvested from the form) and that page remains and can be browsed by other members.Sounded to me like it should be simple. Wrong.

As I said, I can make/design the forms with all the form elements (check boxes, radio buttons, textareas etc.) but from there on in I'm completely lost.

I've heard people mention CGI, Perl, MySQL and I've looked through the tutorial links they've given me and they might as well be speaking greek. I'll study what I have to as long as I know exactly where I have to go with this to get from A to B and am badly in need of a roadmap.

I can map out, design the site and register this guy's domain name for him and find a host that can handle whatever I need (CGI, Perl, databases, whatever - once I find out what that is exactly) but I'm desparately in need of a roadmap and would sure appreciate some help. Thanks so much in advance and thanks for having me. Cheers.

Here's a pretty good primer on working with php and mysql.

http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/...sics/page1.html

The second page (toward the bottom) is what you'll need specifically, but the rest should help you out some.

All you're going to be doing is creating a database table with one column for each field in your form, plus a column for a unique identifier. When someone fills out the form, you use php to put the form values into the database table. When someone wants to see the information, you use php to retrieve the values from the table and print them to the screen.

Thanks for the info Bricker. I'll check that all out. Much appreciated.

Come on back if you have any specific questions/problems .

Will do bricker and thanks again for the info. I can see where my weekend will be spent I'm sure I'll have questions in no time. I really appreciate the help.

Just went through that page and things are starting to come into focus. Based on what I've seen so far, I've chosen http://www.linksky.com/ to host the site. Looks like their prices are great and they appear to host everything I think I'm going to need. Off now to study.

i'm with Bluzman as far as being completely new and it all being rather Greek. i went over the tutorial Before the Beginning and am wondering where to get info on ASP since i'm running Windows. How hard is it to run a database when you aren't running your own server?

Is PHP superior to ASP?

thanks so much!

~niagra

*LOL* I dare you to ask this question in the PHP forum (no, really don't). I prefer PHP to ASP simply because, even if it is only just as good now, it holds much greater potential for the future.

lol, i had my doubts asking that particular question on this board at all, and i appreciate the answer. i've heard practically nothing about asp, and everything about PHP, so i'll have to reasearch it's use on Windows a bit more... Thanks and i'll skip the dare

~niagra

>>i've heard practically nothing about asp, and everything about PHP
Now that's a rare case!