Ok…Hey all. I really am completely new to web development and have (in the past two weeks…I learn extremely fast) grasped html and css pretty well. I am having a problem with PHP and MySQL. I have a great sense of humor, so if you want to make fun…go ahead…I deserve it.

I get the MySQL part…that’s easy…but php I am having a problem with. I am creating a site where people (i.e. realtors and potential buyers/sellers) will login, rate each other, forum, etc…you get the point…it’s a community with a lot of content I am working on. Now I am learning PHP as I am developing this (trust me…I am not crazy, just really driven).

I am using this tutorial to develop the registration/login/blah blah stuff,
http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/40/0.php

But I am not sure if I am going about it correctly. What I have been doing, is for each new script I embed it inside of html and save it as xyz.php. The reasons that I am doing this is 1)want html for SEO reasons, 2)don’t want to lose my formatting and 3)don’t really know any other way to do this. So for example, if I have signup.php which has a form whose action is register.php…then register.php is an entirely new .php file with the php code embedded inside of the html. Get it…I hope so.

Now I know there is another way to do this and save the formatting because I did it with a calculator program I downloaded (where I made a master template and so on). It is at:
http://ratemyhomepro.com/resources/calculators/calculators.php
This had really good directions, and I followed them, but didn’t really know what I was doing…I think it used something called “smarty” (no idea what that means or is). Now I have looked at the code for this and what I think it is doing is just running everything inside the master template…but I am unsure how to do this (trust me…I am researching it). I found this program at:
http://www.mortgagecalculatorsplus.com/

If you want to see what I have done thus far with the registration then see:
http://ratemyhomepro.com/community/signup.php

the form on this page has an action=register.php, which sends an e-mail which has a link to activate.php…you get the idea…and these are all separate files with php embedded in html.

Am I going about this correctly…any ideas, questions, comments, suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Nick

P.S. Hope I don’t sound like an idiot…I’m really not. Just Extremely new to this.

P.P.S. You experienced coders out there…Be Gentle!

You've only started PHP and your first project is something like this? It's incredibly ambitious.
First of all, can I suggest that you take a look at existing open source php content management systems? I'm not trying to discourage you from your coding, but generally it's a better idea to use something someone's already done a good job on writing.
But if you are determined to write it all yourself. I would slow down. Break the project into smaller bits.
Smarty is a big thing to get into on a first project - I would just code normally, but try and keep the design as separate as you can, in the PHP and by using CSS for the HTML.
I congratulate you on your ambition, but I get the feeling that you are flying into a large project without doing all the necessary groundwork in coding expertise.