BleepingComputer.com: Kinda a social networking site

What i'm looking to make is a site kinda similar to your facebook and myspace, just for educational purposes... a site where you can create your profile and pictures and write on a "wall", have a "my friends" kinda thing, i'm after the challenge.

I realise this will be mostly done with a mySQL database and PHP, but don't really have much idea how to code it.

I have had a bit of a look on google but have given up, there are some pretty decent tutorials, but none that really do what i want. From past experience though, i will now be able to find it on google as i have posted on BC... it's generally the way it's worked...

Any idea's or people interested in helping me out? i know it will be a big job...

You need to sit down and write down exactly all of the functionality that you want. Then you need to figure out how all of that functionality is going to tie together (in writing). Then you figure out how you are going to implement all of that functionality (again, in writing). Then you need to specifically figure out to code each bit of functionality. Then you can start coding. You start by getting one thing to work at a time. Once all of the separate elements work perfectly on their own, then you tie them all together.

You shouldn't write any code at all until you figure out what you want to accomplish first.

ok, i'll give it a go... i'm right in thinking it will be php and mysql? or are there other languages that would be better suited to it?

PHP and MySQL are fine, but you could really use any language that you want.

ok, so i have sat down and drawn it all out, well how i want the layout of the profile to be. now i need to start working out how to code each bit and what fields i'll need in the database.

i think what i have to do, correct me if i'm wrong(!) is:

have user ID's, which basically controls the page, when you visit ID:100's page,

the page should use php to pull user 100's photo name etc from the database?

or is this a long way of going about it?

Does anyone know any good site/references that would explain how to make dynaimic web pages using php and mysql, i've googled around a bit, but most of them aren't worth reading.

What is it specifically you want to learn? The best way to go about it is to figure out what you want to do (on a small scale), the do it. For instance, figure out how to load and display an image using PHP. Or put together the text from several different files to create a single unified page. For instance, you could use php to pull RSS feeds from a couple of sites, and display them in a TweetDeck style.

That's how I teach myself to code. I am way past the stage where I can follow tutorials to do much. My questions are more like "I need to display local weather on a webpage. How can I pull that information together in .PHP, .ASP, Perl, or whatever." Then I break it down into smaller parts. How do I pull an RSS feed from a website? How do I parse an RSS feed to keep just what I want? How do I display it to a web page? How do I make it update every 10 minutes? With PHP, you can get away with learning this way because the language is not that complex (which is not to say that it is not very powerful). I have been working on some Javascript for the last month that is incredibly complex, and that is how I am doing it. I try to break down the task into small steps, then I go about finding samples. I end up throwing out most of what I find because they are crap samples, but I don't know that they are crap until I look at the documentation and understand what each part of a script does. Even though I may not use much of what I find, I still learn.

not to but in, or to say that you cannot do it yourself, but diving into php/mysql to make a fully functional social networking site is a huge goal, there are many projects out there that do it already

this is just an example that i stumbled upon the other day: http://www.boonex.com/

i know it is a big job, but i'm up for it.

i have started breaking it down into smaller questions, such as, how do i display/call different users photo's etc... so i dare say i will have a lot of smaller questions for you soon.

i did try looking into other mobs that have already done something similar and offer a download but couldn't find anything worthy/customisable.

that link that was posted for the dolphin download is good, although i had already seen it, some of it's features were lacking, which is why i want to build it myself, that way i only have myself to blame if something doesn't work right.

First problem is this, i have the messages save into the database with an ID that auto increments. Then i use this code to return the previous messages:

<?
echo "$row[1]<br />\n";
?>

problem is it places the messages that have the lowest ID first, so the latest posts are towards the bottom, can i sort these somehow? I've been looking into putting them into an array and then sort them somehow, is this right?

EDIT: Found it "ORDER BY". Still stuck on the picture problem though