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Hi. I am in the initial phase (ie, conceptual design) of building a website which will provide a searchable directory of a particular kind of resources. It will have three main interfaces, for:
Providers to enter their resources and specify various features
Visitors to search on those features and locate providers
Administrator(s) to keep an eye on things
I'm also using this project to better learn PHP, since I learn best by doing something non-trivial. And I'm in no hurry.
While it would be very educational to code the entire thing from scratch, I have no objections whatsoever to re-using existing resources. Especially since I do want to publish this and would like to make sure I'm building a secure site.
Can anyone recommend existing open source code or a framework that would be suitable for this project?
Drupal or Joomla if you want a prototype up and running fast to test the waters. You could easily build something fairly custom using Drupal and CCK/Views and use it as a prototype. If you need a little more control over the implementation you could use Joomla.
If you have a lot more time and need full control over the application, something like CodeIgnitor, Zend Framework, CakePHP would probaly suit you better.
I cannot offe3r any more advice unless you were very specific to the details/requirements.
If you're keen to learn PHP i suggest you start with writing codes yourself.
It will look like using a prototype could speed you up but you can't control things if you don't understand it!
A good example from me was: I was trying to split a string into two lines by simply put a \r\n. But since I chose Jquery prototype to develop, I didn't be away it silently escape \r and \n when the response returned from its AJAX function. It took me 1 hour to find this out but this should take about 2 mins if I chose to use original JS
Hope it will help you to choose a right to start with!