[Phpwm] Opportunity to teach your PHP knowledge to me

[Simon Ferre]

Hi

I've been on the list for a while but haven't had much to say as of yet.

Not last year, but the year before, in October (I remember this because it
was my wedding anniversary on the second day of the course), I attended a
two day PHP introductory course with Open Advantage, and was very happy with
what I learned that day.  Elliot was a great tutor.

Since then I have had some dealing with writing dynamic areas for my
father-in-law's website - www.portsmouthdiabetes.org.uk which was
interesting although if you see the site, some of the dynamic bits were
ready made modules which I was able to use fairly easily (Bulletin board,
chat room etc), while others I wrote from scratch (Your articles, Diabetic
Groups etc).

Now, here's the crunch time:  I have an idea for a website, one which could
become very successful if pitched right, and I want to write it myself in
PHP and MYSQL.

My first question is, do any of you have real-world experience of very busy
websites written in the aforementioned systems, and would MYSQL hold up to
the possibility of thousands of hits a day.  If not, I would have to look at
using something like Oracle from the outset in order to save time and
problems later on.

Secondly, I feel that while I could write my own site, I might not have
enough real-world experience of writing PHP code to be able to think of
every scenario at the outset.  I wonder then if one of you PHP guru's
wouldn't mind me becoming your apprentice (for want of a better word) where
I could be involved in the writing of some PHP code with the goal of
strengthening my skills, or, if it was far above my level of experience,
would someone be willing to help by writing the site (with me assisting
where I can as I want to learn as I go along).  Of course money would be an
incentive (how much I don't know as we were told today that our site might
be 20 man-days of coding).

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on this, along with information on
what the going rate is these days for a PHP/MySQL Developer.

Awaiting your responses.

Simon Ferre