Looking for someone who can do PHP / JS

Peter wrote:

believe boutique.aero got totally wiped out recently, including backups.

That happened in March. They are now back on their feet.

Peter wrote:

The problem with anything like this is that some years down the road it will be out of fashion,

Bootstrap (which is basically a CSS library) and jquery aren’t going anywhere, they will endure at least as long as PHP. Neither bootstrap nor jquery are or were ever a “fashionable” thing (especially jquery). You’re still going to have to write the user interface, and bootstrap will make it a lot less painful than trying to write your own CSS from scratch. Similarly, using jquery is a lot less painful than doing javascript on its own.

Doing it in PHP, by the way, won’t get you away from this – you’re still going to have to migrate to newer versions of PHP, often having to fix things to be compatible with the new version. Debian 10 (which is very conservative) drops support for php5 for instance, and php7.0 is already EOL.

Nor is being closed source going to get you away from security exploits. The big popular projects tend to get exploited because they are popular and installed in lots of places. But even small projects will still get exploited: I ran a forum that was literally one of a kind and the arseholes who make the XRumer spamming software still saw fit to add this one-off forum software to their spammers kit, and actually keep up with changes implemented to defeat them. If someone wants to exploit your forum, they will try, so you still must be extremely fastidious when writing the software and you still have to maintain it due to the number of automated tools around that will find things like cross site scripting, cross site request forgery, SQL injections etc. (and on the latter, unfortunately the way many people have been taught to write PHP invites SQL injection, too many people still build their queries by string concatenation/subsitution which is simply the wrong way to do it).

alioth wrote:

Nor is being closed source going to get you away from security exploits.

Security by obscurity doesn’t work. It has been proved over and over again.

It’s a static web page. While it works on a mobile device, Google is quite correct to call it “not mobile friendly”, the text doesn’t auto resize to something that’s comfortable on a phone held in portrait mode (how most people hold phones), and the pictures are a bit “thumbnaily” meaning the reader is constantly having to zoom in and out. Yes it works, it’s just uncomfortable for a long read.

Never upgrading the OS on an internet connected server isn’t a very good policy. Once the OS is no longer getting security updates, it’s only a matter of time before it gets exploited. Once the PHP version is old enough and is no longer supported, and has known security weaknesses, someone will want to hack it – stealing the bandwidth or using it as a platform to launch attacks from is enough motivation.

Things like Bootstrap (which isn’t a framework) take all the tedium out of making a site work in a way that’s comfortable to users both on desktop and on various mobile devices. Bootstrap isn’t complicated, anyone who understands basic CSS can get to grips with Bootstrap pretty quickly, because it’s all done with CSS. You want to take the pain out of supporting both desktop and mobile if you’re going to make a site that’s dynamic – which is what you’re doing (otherwise, you wouldn’t need PHP). Things like REST APIs are not fashionable frameworks either. The first RESTful service was written by Tim Berners Lee in 1991 at CERN on his NeXT workstation. The typical REST/JSON API is just taking that idea further to allow one computer program (e.g. a jquery + JavaScript front end) get or post information to another (the back end). None of these things are “fashionable frameworks” but take a lot of the pain out of developing a system that must support desktop and mobile, and be something other than a static web site.

That’s not PHP, Peter. It is Javascript.