I have been using Dreamweaver MX for a number of years. Whilst I am happy with designing standard sites and using html, java and CSS etc. I have never been involved with using databases.

I have a need to amend my site. I have approx 1200 images that my site visitors can browse through. At the moment my site is set up as a photo album style.
The images are being added to all the time and I want to have the site searchable. Each image has a name (description) and an ID number. I would like the vistor to browse by categories but also to search by the name or number.

I assume that a database is the way to go but wondered if anyone had any pointers for me, I have a few reference books, but nothing can beat grass root advice.

TIA
Sparky

It's quite a big project with a lot of learning to move from static to dynamic sites. What I found was that there were so many different technologies that I needed to learn that it's taken much longer than I expected. I felt stretched too thin at times.

So I'd start by learning about tables, linking them togather with foreign keys to start with. Get the DW tutorial and work through that, then experiment with some easy examples, download some other people's samples and work through them to see how they did things.

A word of advice: identify what thecnology you have available at this time: what your webhost supports. Based on that, look for a tutorial for either if MS windows server, then ASP and MS Access or if APACHE Server then PHP and MySQL. Then look for a tutorial to understand the basics of the language you are going to face. There is a great little book called SQL in 10 minutes by Ben Forta, it will show you the basics of SQL that can be applied to MySQL, SQL and any other dbs. Also is very cheap.

There are many tutorials for doing what you want or close to it. It's going to be frustrating at times but when you do it...eureka!!!!! you'll have a great time.

Cheers.

Thanks Javier,

Thats exactly the kind of help I was looking for. I am going to look for that book now! My server is running Myphp to answer your questions.
Where are the best places to find tutorials?
Mark

the two books I bought

Dreamweaver MX 2004 with asp, coldfusion and php by jeffrey bardzell isbn 0-321-24157-6

Macromedia press, good general introduction but doesn"t go into a lot of detail, cd with all the applications. Probably out of date now.

Web database applications with php & mysql hugh willand and david land isbn 9 780596 000417

good detailed stuff, all hand coding, very easy intro to mysql and php but really gets into a lot of detail, again it has probably been updated. I bought database driven website using php & mysql by Kevin Yank isbn 6 89076 10919 2 thinking it was an update on the previous book and have never use it, it's for sale on amazon.ca

I recall searching and finding some really useful tutorials, there was a dreamweaver one about building a blog that was very helpful but I can't recall where it was.