Hi,
The question, is it easy to do photo album and small CMS, annd appointment script for a clinic? I mean does it take alot of time and code?
Photo album is probably quite straight forward.
CMS depends. What do you need it for? There are lots of CMS options, and most take a fair bit of work. Do you need one?
An appointment script? Would no doubt take a good deal of work to do from scratch. There are some third party services that would probably handle this for you and could seamlessly plug in to your site.
I like building things from scratch so I understand a bit more about my code. What I mean in CMS is 2 things:
1- The administrator can add posts to the website and they are organised in pages, for example every page will have 10 posts. And he will be able to delete/edit any of them easily.
2- Small forum, not like vBulletin but something very simple so the user can register and add a thread, and other users can reply to that thread with simple editor.
You could save yourself a lot of time by buying a good CMS or using one of the many free ones out there. A good commercial one is ExpressionEngine, and similar free ones include MODx and SilverStripe. And of course, the usual suspects like Drupal, Joomla! and so on. These all have so many built in features that is seems inefficient to build your own from scratch, but then, if you like the challenge… it’s up to you.
So if I want to learn PHP just to build CMS then I do not need to learn it? And instead of that read about how to edit those CMSs to go with my needs?
Yes, absolutely. To learn PHP just to build yourself a CMS is a big undertaking, not really practical if you need to get a site up in the near future. I know very little PHP, and after using a few CMSs, I’ve decided to stick with ExpressionEngine, as it is the most elegant and easy-t-use tool around, in my view. You don’t need to know any PHP to use it. It certainly does what you listed above, although I think no matter what CMS you use, you might have to go further afield to deal with the appointments—whether that means finding a suitable plugin or finding a 3rd party provider.
But the question is, is it easy to edit the theme or the style of these CMSs?
It depends on the CMS. Some are very hard to edit, but the reason I like ExpressionEngine and others like MODx is that, in terms of the theme, you start with a blank page. The theme/layout/css are totally in your hands, just as if you were doing a static page. You build the page the way you want, then add in tags where you want the CMS to insert content. Very easy.
So I think I’ll spend my time learning .Net and just a bit of PHP. 