Hey guys, well a while ago, someone made me a website, a coppermine thing. but nows its down, and its driving me crazy, you see it says fatal error and stuff www.mcdesigns.co.nr and when i tried 2 download coppermine it said the same thing on there website.
So i was wondering if anyone else knew of any other programs like that, it would be great if they werent just gallerys like coppermine is, so im looking for a website maker, then ill find a free domain and all that stuff.
So if anyone knows of any programs that could help me out, or a site that dosnt have their name all over it, freewebs for example i would be very gratefull.
Thankyou Michael

Best to learn it yourself so you can do whatever you want.

Notepad ++
Tutorials on HTML dog and W3Schools.

is it hard to do? i would like something snazzy tho, and i doubt i could do that.
btw whats with ure possum?

The sort of site you're looking for (by the sounds of it) won't be a 5 min task to either learn or code as there'll be a lot of backend coding with database integration and the likes, separate to the HTML that visitors will see.

Learning HTML itself isn't so hard, although cross-browser issues (thanks m$!) can be quite frustrating sometimes, learning something to code the backend for the database etc will require knowing / learning real programming (PHP or Perl for example) which aren't so quick to pick up on as HTML.

By the sounds of it, a CMS (Content Management System) is what you're after right now. Something along the lines of Drupal or Joomla (Drupal may be a little overwhelming the first time you see it). Both of these are free and you can integrate galleries, forums and a lot more into them while retaining a main general site too for the likes of news articles and whatever else you want.

That said, installing these on some free web host may not be an option. I didn't even know people offered free hosting any more, especially seeing as these days, you can get an entire dedicated server for a year for about the price of a pint but you might get lucky



Regards,

Ian

If it turns out that you will be using a new CMS / Blog System, whatever just go over to http://www.opensourcecms.com/. There you can try out the different Systems and just find out what you really need and which System gives you what you want. But beware, setting up a simple Site (if you want to alter it a bit) can be very time consuming. For my little Homepage which uses Textpattern it took me a Weekend to figure out how all works and how I can alter it to my needs.

Quote from mickyc30 :

btw whats with ure possum?

It gets excited over you

Well www.zymic.com is a nice site for free webhosting. There is a FTP upload option so you can upload Joomla to it. It also doesnt give you a rubbish(but its not perect either... ) domain. It has a nice control panel too with PHP and MySQL compatability.

For example, Dynamic Racings site and many other teams sites' are made with Joomla

Quote from pine-fin :

It gets excited over you

fair enough, i completely understand

May i step in here?
just my 2p i recommend Macromedia dreamweaver thats what i use at school and well it's quite easy.

Edit oh is this about hosts? damn.

no not just host, a website making tool, dreamweaver soubds intresting. what year are you in?

I'm in year 8 which is the 2'nd year at high school if u don't know. no offense. I will find you a link to the macromedia site. lol forgot the macromedia site never works for me lol. http://www.macromedia.com/ there's the macromedia site Can't find any australian internet sites like play.com and amazon. Would you mind shipping from the US? Or wouldn't it be compatible with your pc? I'm not sure if they have the same hardware. This is the one my school uses it's not the newest but thats adobe dreamweaver cs3 lol macromedia got bought out. http://www.amazon.com/Macromed ... qid=1204144754&sr=8-4 lol just noticed the price you would need to pay abit lol.

lol im in year 10, which is the 4th year of high school if u didnt know lol, yeah that link you be great mate

kk lol quick reply. So i see that english schools have the same year systems as australian schools lol. Hope you don't mind the price all though i only actually let me see if it's less in £ than $

oki doki thanks mate, i might even have that lying around somewhere on a disc.

Quote from Luke.S :

...

All I saw was "lol"

About Dreamweaver, do you really think he is going to buy it?

Btw $ are worth half of what £ are. Can't find it on any uk sites lol.

Quote from mickyc30 :

oki doki thanks mate, i might even have that lying around somewhere on a disc.

Ok mate sry for double post.

Quote from Luke.S :

May i step in here?
just my 2p i recommend Macromedia dreamweaver thats what i use at school and well it's quite easy.

Edit oh is this about hosts? damn.

Bad bad bad bad bad recommendation!

And by claiming that DW makes it "easy".. I'm assuming you're using the drag n plop method of "coding"............ Pretty sure that won't help at all with database design and integration with it. Hell, Notepad is better than DW!

Best editor I've come across for web dev so far is NuSphere PHPEd (for windoze) followed by Komodo when forced to use a iCrap.



Regards,

Ian

Quote from Ian.H :

Bad bad bad bad bad recommendation!

And by claiming that DW makes it "easy".. I'm assuming you're using the drag n plop method of "coding"............ Pretty sure that won't help at all with database design and integration with it. Hell, Notepad is better than DW!

Best editor I've come across for web dev so far is NuSphere PHPEd (for windoze) followed by Komodo when forced to use a iCrap.



Regards,

Ian

Lol yeah i do.

Quote from Luke.S :

Lol yeah i do.

Actually, my reply was a bit rough on that (and didn't read where you said you were in year 8 ). Back when the current version of DW was ~3 IIRC, it's what I used to help teach myself HTML. I used the drag n drop method, then hit F10 IIRC to display the 'raw code'. From here, I worked out that adding a table for example, add <table><tr>..... etc code.. and image <img...> yada yada. 3 months later, I'd scrapped that and started coding from scratch by hand using various web sites as reference then to learn slightly more complex structures and tags.

There's 2 versions of Komodo (Editor and IDE) for Linux / Crap OSX / windoze, where the 'Editor' version is free from ActiveState. Granted, IMO, it's a little more geared to Perl than other scripting languages, but it's what I'm currently using at work as I can't run NuSphere natively on an iCrap. One thing I do like about Komodo over NuSphere however, is being able to use SCP to edit files remotely rather than manually then uploading (albeit from within the app).

I just find DW bloated yet limited and it seems to annoyingly drop '.DS_STORE' files everywhere it accesses... as annoying as windoze thumbs.db files. Unfortunately I had to use it at the design agency I did some work for... and hated every minute of it

On a separate note, I wish we had a chance to code web sites back when I was at school. My first ever "web site" was half a dozen pages on the old Prestel system (I guess some here will remember that.. for those that don't, it was basically teletext )



Regards,

Ian

Since no one mentioned it so far - take a look at Aptana as well. After customizing it I've found it to be quite good - and since it's Eclipse-based you can also get some nifty plugins working for it. It's free, open-source and don't get put off that it's been labeled as the "AJAX IDE" - you don't need to necessarily go that way.

I use DW for accelerated development because I bought it and I don't want to waste my money. I could use Notepad, but it doesn't make sense to do so, when I have DW.. DW just gets rid of the mundane tasks that otherwise get in the way of getting a good idea to a working concept.

After a few moments of writing a page, DW can't properly read or display my code anymore in the Design window, but I don't really use that window, I just use the code window.. and DW still helps because of code colouring. When I make typos, it's easy to find them and fix them. You CAN do quite a bit of drag/drop development in DW, but that's not a bad thing if you're at the bottom of the learning curve. Once you get your head around coding, you won't depend on those features any more.. but they're there for you to use if you want to accelerate your development.

DW has other advantages, including in-built FTP etc.. it's not a bad place to develop sites, and unlike M$ products it doesn't re-write your code when you do something it doesn't understand. It's expensive to buy, though, and there are probably other editors out there that are as good and are free. I develop in ASP, though, so the options are limited for me. DW understands ASP/VB better than any of the free editors I've seen.

A simple syntax-highlighting editor (I use EditPlus - it's payware, but it's cheap), dedication and a lot of time is all you need EP2 is good because you can grab/update the syntax files, add little user tools, etc. Not massively extensible, but that's fine by me.

I'd stay as far away from 'web IDEs' as possible, they do much more harm than good. HTML is a simple, easy-to-use markup language, and CSS isn't very complex either. No IDE I've ever used (and I've used 'em all, from DW to Aptana and back again) has worked even half as well as just doing it yourself.

Outside of web development, I only venture into an IDE for .NET stuff (Visual Studio) and C/C++ (VS or Dev-C++, depending on the need).

Quote from JamesF1 :

I'd stay as far away from 'web IDEs' as possible, they do much more harm than good. HTML is a simple, easy-to-use markup language, and CSS isn't very complex either. No IDE I've ever used (and I've used 'em all, from DW to Aptana and back again) has worked even half as well as just doing it yourself.

A good IDE won't work over what you're doing - you still have to do it - it just helps you do it faster with things like code-completion and syntax highlighting amongst others. Web-specific IDEs, like Aptana, will also do code-completion for JavaScript libraries you've written and not just the typical js classes.

Other than the ease features like that offer when things get complicated, if it's for a quick correction, I'd also stick with a simple text editor, like SCiTE (which is free, open-source, cross-platform as well).

That is true, but there's not much in the way of code-completion that's really required for HTML and CSS, it's often a lot quicker to just type it than to cycle through a list doing completions. I can see the benefits for things like JavaScript, but frankly, you should be keeping JS to a minimum in web pages (even AJAX-style stuff should be done in a very simple, limited way), so it's not really that necessary, unless you intend to go off and break usability and accessibility principles.