[Phpwm] Opportunity to teach your PHP knowledge to me

[David Goodwin]

<snip>

> 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. 


Yes; see various very busy sites - e.g. Slashdot and Digg.com
(Slashdot uses Perl / MySQL, while Digg uses PHP/MySQL (I think)).

> If not, I would have to look at
> using something like Oracle from the outset in order to save time and
> problems later on.
>

There would be no need; unless you need functionality only Oracle can 
provide. If you find MySQL does not offer enough functionality for you, 
check out PostgreSQL. If PostgreSQL doesn't suffice then check out e.g. 
Oracle.

I'd suggest you avoid over optimising your site from the beginning, as 
it can be hard to spot bottlenecks in advance. Once you have a working 
site, then start to optimise it using e.g. apc, memcached, tweaked 
Apache settings, tweaked MySQL settings etc.

> 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).

I'm sure there are plenty of people on this list who could provide this 
help (myself included).

> 
> 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.

As far as I can tell it varies widely - it depends on what attributes 
and experience you are seeking.

Thanks,
David.