Looking for PHP & MySQL mentor

Hi,

I really would, just like to have discussion about what I'm doing and maybe get some help.

What am I doing?

Well, what I want to do is build a website for my daughters' school. Its a private immersion school for the Mohawk & Cayuga languages. Mohawk & Cayuga are nations within the Iroquois Confederacy.

I freelance as a graphic artist and while some clients requested web design, it has always been basic html splash pages. Although, at my expense I have tackled flash just because I wanted to learn it, here's a link to the flash splash page I did: 2oolman.com

I found flash alot more challenging and more interesting to look at. I followed a tutorial to create a website for my previous job, here's a link to that: Kawenn:io/Gaweni:yo Private School

With kglpp.ca though, I had planned to implement some php & mysql to make it more dynamic but I had issues with some coding in terminal, ran out of time looking for resolution and eventually just gave up.

So now, I have nothing but time and want to create a fully-functional database driven website with these features:

1 - a community dictionary; where speakers can add words and translation, audio, video and pictures; and learners can search by english or however for words and the media associated with those words would be downloadable, free for low resolution and paid for full quality; and hopefully make it mobile ...

2 - a member system consisting of parent, teacher/staff, student and guest; and i wasn't sure but maybe make it so that if they pay monthly to be a member they can download a certain amount of full-quality items from the 'community dictionary' for free ..

3 - online store to sell teaching resource; a place where other schools in other communities can purchase the curriculum or add to it ..

With all that said, whats the easiest way to make this happen? Could you help me plan it out better? Is there something I'm missing?

What i've done so far:

- i have tutorials for php & mysql (its not really helping) .. i've been searching everywhere for knowledge - php developers site, youtube tutorials, - but nothing is really answering questions i have .. i know and can create a database, add tables - thats about it .. i know some php now and have apache working on my system .. i can do includes ..

- through my searching i found that fireworks would be a good start .. its really good for designing .. but i don't know what to do after i've designed it .. how do i add the functionality? .. here's what i did - basically just copied facebook - kgps_login

so, maybe i'm just looking for a work flow .. where do i start? .. i'm not sure ..

i don't have the money to pay for things .. but maybe i can get some sponsors if i need some ..

thanks for reading ..

That's quite a task. You may want to look into bulletin board software like Xoops, Php-Nuke, Joomla or another. They are free, very customizable and easy to administer.

yes .. quite the task, indeed ..

for starters i'm going with with this guys tutorials - 1. How to Create A Basic Membership Website System Using PHP and MySQL .. out of all the others - this guys makes sense .. i can't use my ISP as a test server like he can though .. for some reason dreamweaver won't let me add a subfolder .. /public_html ..

but whatever -

so yes, thank you for your input .. i will look into the software you mentioned ..

Sounds more like you need to use something like Ruby on Rails framework.....It would probably be a bit easier IMO