Hey,

Bit of a longshot but wondering if any of you guys are web developers or know much about web development. I have a database I've constructed for some of my PhD research into the location of slave shipwrecks. It's currently built in MS Access 2010 and has about 700 entries which contain hyperlinks to digitised primary documents (i.e. images) which contain data.

I have web hosting which includes PHP and a MySQL database and need to build something which will display the data and allow users to click on hyperlinks which show them the relevant image. I'm aiming for a design similar to this database website: http://www.slavevoyages.org which my research is based on.

Anyone able to provide any pointers, particularly in relation to free templates I could use to construct the website? Otherwise, if any of you are web devs and can build a professional looking site similar to the one I've linked above (I'm happy to do the data migration) then feel free to PM me a quote.

Chade

EDIT: Oh, unfortunately the website can't use CMS packages like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla due to daft restrictions placed by the central IT team at my Uni hosting.

Ideally, you'd want to go with a full web framework (I love Symfony) to make development and testing go more smoothly, but just making some basic database access code in PHP is pretty easy, too. All you really need is a decent tutorial, of which there are many out there, and the PHP/MySQL reference sites to look up functions.

Making it pretty is the harder part, as that requires more creativity, but there are lots of free web templates you can find and adapt, too. Google is your friend!

Chade:

EDIT: Oh, unfortunately the website can't use CMS packages like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla due to daft restrictions placed by the central IT team at my Uni hosting.

That's called being sensible, to be honest.

CMS are notoriously insecure.

If you can migrate the data into mysql on your own I think you're nearly there. I'd display it in a table (alike to how it sits in the database) with the images being proper hyperlinks. Then if you want to keep it cheap slap a free website template over it. You can find plenty of them with some Googling and if you want to secure some uniqueness you can buy cheap templates or spend a bit more for a professional designer. If it doesn't need more content than that it's really just the design that goes over it, right?

Okay. The problems I chatted about with you are sorted.

I'll be more than happy to do this for you. Grab me in the morning when I am more with it, though. :)

Zarquan:

Ideally, you'd want to go with a full web framework (I love Symfony)

Despite liking this post, and as much as I have enjoyed using Symfony in the past, it is also vulnerable to the most basic SQL injection attacks.

http://www.securityfocus.com.

I can't find anything on that Security Focus site, but when I was using Symfony, it seemed they had pretty good XSS failsafes in place. You have to make sure you take advatage of features like that, of course, but they're there. Neithere here nor there now, as Chade won't be able to use it.

Actually I may have just been signed up to a CMS trial scheme my university are running, not sure on the software package yet - still waiting for information as I'm one of the early adopters.