I’ve been using Xampp and Mambo for the past few years to run my web site. Quite frankly it looks tired and behind the times compared to what is coming from all you script experts out there. So … its time for a rebuild, but where to start :? There are some brilliant scripts and website designs here, and modifications and enhancements of those designs too, but I’m not sure I know which way to go first. I’m no stranger to servers and the OS side of things, and PHP 5 is already installed on my current server. I’ve even had a play with the Ajax stuff. There is probably a thread on this buried somewhere, but some pointers or a road map of sorts would be mightily appreciated
I think the answer depends on how much effort you want to invest in creating your website, and what you plan on offering there.
You can start with a fairly turnkey overall expansible design that’s easy to modify by using the WD/AJAX/PHP template sets
If you wanted a unique design, but still reuse the basic structure of the WD/AJAX/PHP template (which is built using Kevin’s included PHP site structure), you could find a template you like at http://www.oswd.org/ , slice the selected template up to fit within the top.php, header.php, menubar.php, footer.php sections, and clone the required parts into the template CSS, and you’d have a new, unique looking site.
Or… you could start from scratch (or an OSWD template) and totally roll-your-own.
I’d recommend you set the ‘standards’ for your new site at CSS 2.1 and at least XHTML 1.0-Transitional (although 1.0-Strict would be preferable).
Yeah there sure are a lot of choices :lol:. I’ve started by going back to what I have and seeing what needs updating in Xampp. I’m currently a few versions behind (1.7 is that latest), and that will give me all the security patches and latest versions for PHP, MySql and Apache. Then I think it will be a matter of making sure I back up all the current content, delete everything and starting a fresh.
I think I’ll go with the suggestion of the Saratoga scripts and templates. It will be worth putting a bit of time into getting it updated, and even though the learning can be quite steep its a good way of keeping the grey matter exercised :lol:
