How to build a website

[mattg2k4]

I'm going to build a website for my youth group, and want some advice on how to make it. They have a T1 available, so it will probably be hosted on the site on a linux server. I want it to have at minimum, a calendar section, an anouncement section, an articles section, a picture section, and a forum section. I would also like it do double as an email server that will send out anouncements to members.

What I'm looking for:

-Information on how to build a website. I'm talking layout and code. I know html basics, but I don't know any php or asp. Would it be worth it to learn those? How should I lay it out?

-Info on setting up a linux server. I've installed Red Hat before, but that's as far as my experience goes.

-Putting a forum on it. I imagine I will use some free forum such as phpBB. What forums would you recomend? Any trick to setting it up?

Thanks

[Force Flow]

www.sitepoint.com has a lot of good articles for web building and web design.

[mairving]

I would:

• Get someone else to host it for you. It is fairly inexpensive, $5-10/month. Setting up your own webserver is not all that difficult but for a small site like yours, not worth it since you have security issues, getting PHP/MySQL, etc to work properly.
• PHPBB or Invision are the two best free boards out there. Vbulletin like the one used here costs around $160.
• PHP is the way to go especially since you want to use a Linux server. It can make your life easier plus if you want to edit the templates in PHPBB, you will need some PHP knowledge.

[mattg2k4]

Thanks for that site force_flow2002, seems to have some pretty good info on it.

mairving: Another reason I want to host it on site is the simple fact that I'd like to learn how to set it all up myself. Plus they have plenty of old computers available that are just begging to be turned into linux servers
But I'm not rejecting 3rd-party hosting. If I can't get it up and working in a reasonable time, or don't have decent uptime, I'll move it to a 3rd party host.

Any suggestions about where to learn about php? A book or website perhaps? I'm researching it on www.sitepoint.com but any other sources would be helpful.

[mairving]

Several sites where you can learn PHP:
http://www.codingclick.com/
http://www.devshed.com/
http://www.phpbuilder.com/
http://www.programmertutorials.com/
http://www.weberdev.com/
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/
http://www.zend.com/
http://www.php.net/

A good book is PHP an MySQL Web Development.