Building your own website is an interesting and time-consulting hobby, like mining and smelting your own metal, but it's gotten so involved, it might make sense to let someone else do most of the work. Build the software, setup the database, design the html & css, ensure you haven't allowed any SQL injection, log intrusion detection, monitor for runaway processes... it can be pretty consuming.
I've been doing this for a living for over a decade, and it's not bad for paying clients to have a consultant on call, and someone monitoring their logs every day, running their backups, updating their OS. But for a volunteer retiree, it can be a big obligation...
WordPress.com gives you a free yourcharityname.wordpress.com site for free, and there are a HUGE number of add-ons, plugins and themes to make the site look any way you want and work any way you like. I'm sure you can find some event listing or calendar control that provides the functions you're looking for, and did I mention, Free?
I've recommended this choice to a couple of charities. Many of the big providers (Google, for example) are happy to provide basic services (like a 10-user Google Apps account) to registered charities. In the US, it's a 501(c)(3) tax status you can use a proof; I'm not sure what if the equivalent UK form is recognized by google.co.uk, but it's worth poking around. A Google Apps account can give you some email addresses (support, sales, webmaster, contact, etc.) and some shared web space for documents, albums, etc. which can either be private or shared.
On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 7:11 PM, M Jarvis brewdaddy@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Mike Copeland mike@ggisoft.com wrote:
John,
A few thoughts... What software you use will depend on where you host the data. Preferably it is hosted on a Linux box (because anything Microsoft is evil, lol) and you're correct that MySQL will be the target storage engine.
John-
Like Mike said you have some options... MySQL (or PostGReSQL) would be my choice for the data - I'm sure there are others.
Do you know any ASP? I ask because at least for me the hard part about getting started writing backend database and reporting tools was realizing that as you load a page you can be going back and forth between static code (HTML) and dynamic code (the ASP or PHP). Once you get a handle on that your progress goes faster and faster...
The concept is pretty simple - more or less pull the data using whatever criteria or options you or the user select, use HTML to build a table (as in HTML, not database), ratchet through the records and create the HTML tags for each line as you go.... You'll be doing a lot of "<TR><TD>
</TR></TD> " matching... ;)
It's been a while for me personally but a lot of the folks around here I'm sure are up to speed with this and happy to help...
Good luck!
-- Matt Jarvis Eugene, Oregon USA
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