General approach to take

[Wellington]

Hello.

I have been slowly poking away at trying to setup a website for a new VA utilizing phpVMS and after having made a dent I'm concerned I've taken the wrong approach. I have rudimentary knowledge of web development. I've poked around at some basic HTML/CSS udemys and things of that nature. I have some friends who are software engineers and web developers who understand all of this stuff, and one of them has helped me with an initial setup, but I don't want to be presumptuous and take advantage of them by pressing them to hold my hand.

Thus far, my plan has been to have a public facing Wordpress site, as that is manageable for me, with phpVMS serving as my members-only area for the operations side of things. I've worked up a pretty creditable Wordpress site and have started to put more of an eye towards working on getting phpVMS running, but in doing so I've realized that a lot of the more successful VAs utilizing phpVMS are using it as the whole site. I must have been misunderstanding what phpVMS was meant for.

I know at the end of the day this is more of an opinion, but am I correct in this new assumption that phpVMS is meant to be the whole website? Or is it common to do it as I was initially doing it?

That all being asked, what can you guys recommend for figuring out phpVMS 7 without having a web/software development background? I've read through a lot of http://docs.phpvms.net/ and to be honest much of it is above my head and seems to be more oriented towards a type of tutorial that is "here is how you find the files that you already know you'll need and what to do with" vs. taking a layman like myself through. There's some on YouTube but most that I've found are very old and for phpVMS 5.

Any general advice or direction is welcome, as well as recommendations on tutorials, etc.

Thanks!

[ProAvia]

phpVMS 7 is still in beta and probably shouldn't be used for a production site. There are no addons, skins, etc for it yet. Look into using phpVMS 5.5.2  (sometimes referred to as the Simpilot version) - lots of skins, addons and ACARS programs available. You will have to use PHP 5.3 - 5.6 with it. In any case, don't try to use free hosting - some stuff just won't work correctly - at least not without a lot of tweaking.

phpVMS can be used as a CMS - or you can use WordPress, etc as your front end. Personally, I think using both just adds to the complexity and upkeep of the site. Several of us use phpVMS as our front end and add on forum software (such as phpBB). If you use phpVMS as the front end, you can easily lock down the site to allow visitors to see only the parts you want them to see.

The docs you reference are for phpVMS 7- which is completely different from previous versions. 

Version 2.x and 5.5.2 are similar (there were some changes made to make 5.5.2 compatible with PHP 5). But they basically function the same. Search YouTube for 'phpvms' - there are a few videos showing how to install and set it up. Be sure you are not looking at any version 7 videos.

Version 5.0 is supposed to work with PHP 7.0 - but I haven't tried it. It is a rework of version 2.x updated for PHP 7.0.

Edited April 24, 2019 by ProAvia