Constructing a website from the ground up

[Iksander]

Introduction

In this thread I will be writing posts on and about my development cycle of a production website from idea to implementation.

This project is NOT going to be a 'yet-another-blog' startup; it is a completely custom programming job using the Zend Framework, PHP 5, and my own expertise.

I intend to keep track of my progress and maintain a steady objective viewpoint of that progress through this thread; I hope it provides valuable information, inspiration, and insight for those that are interested in learning to program for the web environment.

To start off I have registered the domain, 'thedidact.net' for this website.


This thread is not intended to be a step-by-step tutorial of everything I do, there are plenty of such tutorials (good ones) on the internet which can be found through your favorite search engine.

[Iksander]

Entry 1

Starting out, I have the latest versions of MySQL, PHP, and Apache installed, I am running Linux (the Ubuntu distro) on my laptop - but others should find it rather painless to install those packages on a Windows platform. (ie, you DO NOT need Linux, you can do this on Windows too)

I downloaded Zend Framework 1.0.1 from the Zend website.

I also downloaded HTML Purifier (essential for defending against XSS related attacks) from their website.

In my development webroot I created two directories, one called 'application' and another called 'front'. Inside of 'application' I created a directory called 'global' and another called 'app_thedidact'.

Inside my 'front' directory I created a directory named 'public'; inside 'public' I created the following directories:

• js
• css
• icons
• images
• cache
• xml

-------------------------------------

I then unpacked (for some it will be unzipped) the Zend Framework into the 'global' directory inside the 'application' directory. I moved the 'Zend' directory located inside the 'library' directory out one level into the 'ZendFramework-1.0.1' parent directory. I deleted everything except for the license and version text documents and the directory named 'Zend'.

I also unpacked the HTMLPurifier classes into the 'global' directory.

That does it for now.

[Addict]

This project is NOT going to be a 'yet-another-blog' startup; it is a completely custom programming job using the Zend Framework, PHP 5, and my own expertise.

Well, that's neat, but what will it do? What is the intended function of this website? I don't think you explained this.

[Iksander]

I know I haven't, I will be in a post or two when I begin writing specific code to handle the functionality of the site - I will also address the intent/idea behind this website.

Right now is preliminary environment setup.