How do I create a Youth member management system?

Ok, here's why I asked these questions.

When you design software meant to be used by one organization, you don't have to make it as flexible. It only needs to meet the needs of the one organization.

But if you're designing software that you want to open up to different groups, you want to build an app framework that's more flexible because you need to take into account more users.

I'm not going to lie to you ... you're tackling a big project. Most organizations would put a team of developers on a project like this.

As an individual, it's a great way to learn about software development and develop the essential skills you'll need to pull it off.

I just want you to understand going in that this is not a short-term project that'll take a few weeks to bang out.

At it's heart, the app is a contact manager with a lot of added functionality. So that's where I would start: Build a simple contact manager. That's a great project for a new developer.

Now let's think through the project from the front-end to the back-end.

Your web app is going to live within a web page, so you'll use HTML for the document structure.

You'll use CSS to create the look and feel of the web app.

And you'll use JavaScript for adding the user interface behavior to the web app. You'll probably want to use the jQuery library with it for the DOM manipulation shorthand and any animations you need. And that lets you use the jQuery UI user interface library for stuff like drag-and-drop behaviors.

That covers the front end. On to the back-end ...

You're working with a lot of structured data, so you're going to need to use a relational database management system (RDBMS). The most popular open-source database is MySQL.

MySQL can handle most projects, but you are doing this for a large organization, so I don't know if you'll run into performance problems with it or not.

Another popular database is PostGreSQL. It's designed to handle a huge amount of transactions, so it could be a better choice.

I suggest talking to a more experienced developer who's worked on large scale projects when you get further into the development process and understand exactly what info you need to manage.

When you talk to a structured database, you use SQL or Standard Query Language. It's just a standard way of communicating with database and it's easy to learn.

Now you need to write a back-end program or series of programs that communicates with your front-end and database. You can use a variety of languages to write a back-end program, but the most popular languages are PHP, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (via NodeJS) and Python.

I'm the most familiar with PHP. I've written a few small server-side programs with JavaScript and NodeJS, but I plan on digging deeper into this in the future. I've written a few small programs in Python. And I've never touched Ruby on Rails, but I plan to pick it up eventually.

I don't think you're going to go wrong with any of them. My only warning is about Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails is a combination of a language (Ruby) with a framework (Rails). It hides a lot of complexity from you, which is great for an experienced developer that understands what's happening under the hood, but it can seem like magic to a new developer.

When things go wrong (and they always go wrong), you'll have to figure out what went wrong. And you can't debug magic because you don't understand it.

If Ruby on Rails calls to you, go ahead and use it. There's a very active developer community for it that you can get help from.

But my suggestion is to avoid it as a first language. You want to see the complexity so you can learn about it as you go.

I think that's enough to give you the big picture and let you get started. Any questions?