I have a technical background, but not to the detailed level in websites and the internet. I am setting up my own new website, which will require a database behind it to allow comparison of thousands of records – like an internet dating site, or a price comparison site.
I envisage about 100,000 records, each with about 150 questions, each of which has an average of 5 fixed answers (anywhere from 2 to 12 each) to be selected by the users. The answsers given are then compared between all 100,000 records.
The web front end needs to allow for subscription, data entry from subscribers, output of comparison results, upload of photos, display of photos, etc.
I want build all of this myself, to learn the required skills, but, although I did computer programming back in the late 70s and early 80s at machine code level, I have not done any since – and things have moved on, a very long way!
I’ve had advice from a friend who has set up her own site that I should use Joomla, with a MySQL database behind it, and that all of the hard work has already been done by others and I can download Joomla templates, etc. and configure a database engine easily, without programming skills in PHP, etc.
Can any of you experts out there validate this, and let me know what Joomla extensions I would need, and which ones are free, and which ones I’ll need to pay for? Also, is this easy to setup as a hosted site?