Mark Christensen wrote:
I can't speak to the general availability of PHP skills on the net, except to say I've seen statistics that show that PHP the single most common Mod for Apache with an 850,000 server installed base -- which is about over three times mod pearl's 250,000.
O.k., I'm sold that this is a viable middle of the road technology.
I have some basic skills with PHP and MySQL, and some experience with PosgreSQL. I'm no uberhacker, but I can throw together PHP code a lot faster than pearl CGI, so I think PHP is a reasonable way to go.
That's great! One of the most important things is that people shouldn't need to be uberhackers in order to get involved.... it's the wiki spirit. :-)
I think MySQL will be fine for a project like this, no matter whether we choose PHP or Mod Pearl, but we should take a look at what we are likely to need in the future before making a commitment to a particular database backend.
I think that as long as we are careful to stick to "standard" SQL commands, and not use any that are special to mysql, it is easy to switch to a different backend (Postgres for example) if and when we need to do so.