I've addressed this issue twice before, and several knowledgeable individuals have been very generous with their information and suggestion - for which I am very grateful. I actually put the website development on hold for several months. Now I'm ready to start again, but before I continue on I want to assure myself, again, that I'm going the right way.
The users and I initially made the decision to develop the new site with Dreamweaver as an ASP site. We felt that Adobe was a better choice than Microsoft because of the integraton of all their products, we have two Access databases that need to be integrated with the site, and we needed a model that could be largely maintained by the organization secretary and a few volunteers.
I completed a considerable amount of development late last year and had all of the database interface working perfectly. The problem started when I uploaded to a test server - issues with specifying the file paths. As Rouchie explained, "You have run into a problem that affects nearly all ASP developers. The problem is that the web server hosts your domain name like this:
www.somedomain.com/***where *** represents the root directory (and usually your home page file). IIS cannot do this however because it hosts multiple sites, each one having its own subdirectory to WWWROOT."
If I were going to be the sole maintainer of the site, I could probably deal with this. But I don't believe this is an acceptable situation for the nontechnical people who will be working the the site. Rouchie also suggested, "The solution is to either place all your content (page) files in the same directory, so that the link to the templates will always be the same for every file (this is my approach)." This doesn;'t seem viable either. When completed the site will be HUGE, and if the hundreds of pages can't be organized logically in folder, maintenance would be a nightmare.
The biggest reason for choosing ASP was the Access databases. So my first question deals with finding a solution or an alternative. I developed an Access DB for the organiztion so they could easily maintain all their organizational information: districts, fleets, officers, membership, boat ownership, etc. We considered doing this on the website, but it just didn't seem practical, given the extent of its use for emailing, reporting labeling, etc. It is my understanding that the Access DB can only run on a Windows server. Does that limit me to ASP or ASP.NET?
In one of the postings it was noted that ASP.NET had solved the problem with the paths but also that I shouldn't use Dreamweaver with ASP.NET (which makes sense). Going that route, would we then download the free version of Visual Studio for all who would be updating - or could we still use Contribute for the volunteers, which the secretary and used Visual Studio?
Are there any other alternatives that I should be considering? It is essential that the database be integrated with the site. I'm assuming that Unix/Linix servers don't have the path problem. What would be my alternatives with PHP?
Sorry for being such a rooky about this, but I'd hate to invest all of this time and effort only to come up with something that the users will hate.
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