preinstall vrs self building

[businessman332211@hotmail.com]

I have a question I want to ask people in general. Advice so to speak to try and figure out somethign I want to do. I see a lot of stuff out there relating to PHP Pre-Installs. There 3rd party scripts, of special programs to avoid you having to do it yourself.For instance.Shopping carts, message boards, forums, guestbooks, mailing list managers, chatrooms, and other things that are created so people can download them.I know that creating a basic mailing list takes like 1 day, to add more features it takes more.I am faced with a project now, I am a web designer/coder/programmer. I love programming, I have installed Zen Shopping cart, but then I start to think, if I decided to build this entire shopping cart from scratch how long would it take me. Could I finish in a few weeks, working on it part time, or is building a shopping cart something that will take me months, and months, to finish. I like the preinstalls, but I need something where I can carry the data throughout my pages, and wire it in freely to my clients gallery pages. I like the thrill as well of programming, so I am wondering, if I take the time to start building it, how long to build a basic shopping cart, wired through the websitewww.moondancedesign.com, and is just build for that purpose. How long will that take for me to build. It will only be accepting paypal anyway so no need for major credit card processing, and tax won't be included, so that is not an issue either. So what do you think, is this something I can do, I had some people help me on php freaks before, someone set down and told me not how to, but the general steps needed to build a mailing list, in 1 day I built the form, the mailing list, the area where they log in and send out the emails, the database, and have it record and remove email addresses. It took me 2 days of fiddling with it, and it was the most fun I have had in my entire life, I know that it is a BIG issue in dealing with security, and I want to try to make it secure, but I am still thinking of doing it myself, any advice, or comments, or answers would be greatly appreciated, thanks again in advance.

[justsomeguy]

Programming something yourself always takes a while, but it depends how fast you work obviously, so it's hard to say how long a given task would take a given person.I'm sort of the do-it-yourself type, for a few reasons. You get the experience of actually having done it, when it's finished you know exactly how it works, it only needs to be complex enough to do exactly what you need it to do, and it's fun. By the time you finish stuff, you will want to scrap everything and start over because of what you learned while doing it. Certain things work well, and other things don't, and you figure out pretty quick what works and what doesn't. When I look at the code I wrote years ago, it seems pretty bad, but at the time I thought it was pretty advanced. So that's a major advantage of doing it yourself, you get the experience of having done that.But you don't necessarily need to take on everything yourself. You could start with the shopping cart, and use a 3rd party package to do that, but you could write code to interface with it and use some of the same resources, like user management and logins. You can set up your gallery, and design all the user management parts to talk to the same database that the shopping cart does, so you would have to dig through the shopping cart and see how that works. The major advantage of doing things like this and making bridges between the different pieces of software is that you get to see how other people did it, and you will learn a lot from that as well.I guess that's your choice though, do whatever you feel more comfortable doing.

[businessman332211@hotmail.com]

do you build your own forums, guestbooks, message boards and everything, if so then I think I want to take your advice, because I like you, and you seem like a god of php.

[justsomeguy]

you seem like a god of php.

No no no, I appreciate the compliment, but the primary difference between you and I is experience. Building things yourself is the single best way to get experience though. And having projects you are working on that you like is the difference between actually doing it and not, if it's not an enjoyable project, you won't work on it. So figure out what you want to learn, and make something fun that uses it. When I was really getting into databases and user authentication and everything, I would pick different projects that would teach me different things. I wanted to learn about how to store and retrieve files in a database as opposed to just regular string or number data, how to use PHP to work with images, and I also wanted to learn about logins and authentication, so I created a little photo gallery that used all of those. It stores all the images in a database, and uses the GD library in PHP to manipulate the images, and then I built a little login thing to allow me to update the images online. It was fun to build and it kept me interested, and I picked up some skills that I was able to use later on. If you ask me, that's the key, figure out what you have a weakness in or what you want to learn, and design a little application that will force you to use those things. You'll run into all kinds of issues that you have to find a solution for, and it really helps you get an understanding of what works, and why it works like it does.But these days I work on a lot of different projects, and for each one I figure out if it would make more sense to do things myself or get some 3rd party software. I was able to learn things to the point that I can make some decent money off it now, so now I'm trying to find time to get back to those fun little side projects. The main things I find myself building now are content management systems, everyone needs an easy way to update their website, or manage users, or products, or whatever they've got, and an administration backend is the way to go, the hard part is convincing people to write the checks.

[asylum]

Honestly, I don't think of many people as really good programmers, no offense to anyone here. What I mean when I say I think someone is a good programmer is they can do what they want efficiently in such a way as to make it infinitely expansible without reorganizing their code. They can see the big picture and they can see stupid little math tricks to shorten loops or simplify code that calculates things. Now I only say I don't know many really good programmers is probably because I don't know any of you :)As for doing things yourself, it all depends on how much time it takes you, learning the php concepts and functions that a message board for example would take is only a day, if that. Writing the actual board could be quite time consuming. It's all about organization and figuring out how to combine the things you learned to make something that works. I can't imagine a shopping cart taking you months no matter how much of a novice you are.In any case, I wish you good luck with your site and all your programming endeavors.

[justsomeguy]

do what they want efficiently in such a way as to make it infinitely expansible without reorganizing their code

Yeah, that's the trick, that's where experience really helps. Extensibility is something you always shoot for, but "infintely expansible" takes quite a bit of foresight.

[businessman332211@hotmail.com]

I really appreciate all the advice, I normally get help off of phpfreaks.com and I have a few people I look up there, one kid 16, is a master of css, the best css coder I have ever thought of encountering, he can do anything with css, and now I think I found some php people that inspire me. One personal question, how old areyou, and what all languages do you currently know, "just some guy"

[justsomeguy]

I'm 27, I've been through college so I got exposed to quite a few different languages and things. These days I mostly use PHP though, I've been doing a lot of web work, not many desktop apps.

[businessman332211@hotmail.com]

Ok Thanks I appreciate all the help.