For quite a while now I have been helping to run a fixture exchange system for youth rugby clubs. It started off life as a phone based pencil and paper system, but we moved it onto the Internet in about 1993. More recently it has been database driven and we relied on a company to build it using .ASP
All has been well until the host company said they were no longer going to host .ASP and that I should get this converted to PHP.
Now, I am no web coder but for a few years I have been working with some very skilled people. Sadly they haven’t had the time to help build this for me, but have offered loads of suggestions and ideas. I really needed to get this done myself.
So I went to freelancers.com and looked for anyone who could do the conversion. As it turns out there are lots of folk there who thought it would be easy, but I needed to work fast!
I have for some time been using Dreamweaver as my HTML editor, along with BBEdit on a Mac. There are a number of in-built tools to help code PHP, but you need to know what you are doing before you understand when and how to use them. I have also bought a copy of Interakt’s ‘MX Kollection’ This is basically a framework that writes the PHP code from a library of functions. All you need to know is what function you are doing.
The online help system for this is pretty good, and there are dozens of tutorials to help. It handles just about everything you need for a fairly complex site, including registration, sessions, listing information, amending records and so on.
Have a look at http://www.fixex.com to see the site I built (if you are a youth rugby team, sign up!!), and check out http://www.interaktonline.com for the dreamweaver extensions. I notice the company has now been bought by Adobe (who also now own Macromedia) so perhaps even better things are around the corner. All I know is I couldn’t have built this from nothing to a fully working site in less than a week without this set of extensions, so many thanks to Interakt!
Interakt was indeed bought by Adobe and they have discontinued development of some great extensions. I did find some other one’s that are at least as useful as the Interakt Kollection. Here’s a little more info:
http://webreash.com/super-suite.htmlEDIT: Sadly, this link no longer works.Thanks Ryan- thse do look good. I know Adobe released the ‘toolbox’ for CS3 versions of Dreamweaver, and this was in fact the Interakt stuff under a new name. Same functionality, etc.
What I like about super-suite is things like the paypal checkout and so on. Can you say anything about the size of the include folder with super-suite? With Interakt it was just under 3Mb.
I am still using the Interakt product just because of familiarity. What is the learning curve with Super Suite?