MikeH

If you've developed something yourself using PHP, you will need to convert it to a WHMCS module or have your script use the WHMCS API to create the customer's order (not sure how viable this is as their API isn't very good).
 
Quickest way to integrate with WHMCS IMO would be a simple order form with relevant configuration options/questions for your design work.

You could do this in WHMCS using the generic product and configurable options.
 
Also take a look at Blesta. It's less developed than WHMCS but more modern and quickly catching up.

You do realise if you want the 'best' it will not be the cheapest. Pay for what you get. Also if you have not yet built anything then look at alternatives to WordPress, it is not well suited at all for eCommerce.

Nobody would get a job where I work just through knowing people or by being a name in the industry. The interview process is a very necessary procedure. In an industry where ability and talent matter so greatly I would strongly argue what you know is more important.
If I recommend a friend to the recruitment team that person is still treated just like any other potential candidate, if they lack the ability they will not pass the process, there is zero favouritism.

If it's going to be a large project there's a good chance you'll benefit from using a framework such as Laravel. This will reduce the amount of boilerplate you have to write and help you to learn more advanced patterns (which translate into other languages). It will also help if you introduce other developers in future as you'll be able to follow the best practises and coding style of the framework so you're all familiar with how things work.
 
I would also recommend reading all of this: http://www.phptherightway.com
 
All the best with your new project!

The cost of any project depends on what the client wants and (generally) how many hours it takes to complete.
 
So given an hourly rate of $100 (which is about on par for a good freelance developer in the US) then a $2000 project gives you 20 hours work time, similarly a $20,000 project gives you 200 hours work time. If you weigh that up against some typical types of project a straightforward brochure site can very easily take 20 hours, and something like an average ecommerce site can easily take 200 hours if done properly.

What kind of password protection do you want, only public_html will be accessible externally via HTTP port 80 all others you would have to log in via SSH (port 22) or FTP (port 21) to access.

You could try searching the Wayback Machine. Does it really matter if the date on past articles is 100% accurate? I would consider getting the time of year roughly right, the order right and then making up a specific date/time for past posts.

That's a great resource MikeH. Thank you!
My latest site of 5 months old doesn't show up at all, but my old site does show listings back to 2011, so thanks very much.

 
Edit: Thanks NOCK. I'll try that, too.
 
Much appreciated both of you.

Theres some superb advice in the posts above, I thought I'd share a bit of my story below.
 
I've done some simply awful jobs in my time - even since graduating in 2009. I've done litter picking, graffiti removal, even cleaning public toilets. I was working at a McDonald's in 2011, had my own place to pay for, car etc but i decided I had to get away, so I worked for 60 hours a week and lived like a hermit for a year to save up enough cash to travel. I was on around £6.00 an hour too.
 
That decision changed my life. I discovered web development during my travels from blogging about it. I arrived in Sweden with £3000 in savings and set about making web development a career. That £3000 lasted me 7 months and I lived in pretty awful conditions but just as it was running out I landed my first job - after applying at 30+ agencies, I told them my story and they could see how badly I wanted it. I started on a very bad wage - roughly £13k with no contract - just project to project .
6 Months later after I'd proven myself that was increased to £22k based on a full time contract.
 
I've recently moved back to Manchester and landed myself a very lucrative job as a senior developer at Sainsbury's - more than double what I was earning in Sweden. From here on out I've got my sights set on big things.
Btw Anybody who might be interested in mid/senior dev position based in Manchester drop me a PM
 
Sometimes you just have to forget about the money to get your foot in the door. There's a severe lack of talent at senior levels which is why the pay gets so high, but for entry level positions the competition is fierce, you have to go above and beyond what the others are doing and take any opportunity that you can. There's no substitution for hard, hard work. But it can be done.

I've never worked on very high traffic sites, but have done on some that fall somewhere between.
 
The major things we look at initially:
 
1. Dedicated server optimised for the environment (if anything this is often the most important one)
2. Use of a CDN for static assets
3. Extensive use of caching, via CMS, expiry headers etc etc
4. Use the most appropriate content system
5. ...and of course good code optimised for performance

We've built some very large complex sites on WordPress, and things just become a pain, mostly because a CMS should manage content. Nothing else. Because WordPress attempts to do more than this like dictating markup and classnames in certain places (Navigation) and forcing the devs to write horrible walker functions to get around it. Things just get very messy which ultimately costs the client $$ when it comes to maintenance and/or additions.
 
All this aside the worst aspect of WP is the plugins, so many of them again try to do jobs on the client side, a CMS should have no business dealing with client side functionality like image gallerys with lightboxes and so on. It should just spit out the data. And a developer can then either look for a JavaScript library or write the functionality themselves. So if you avoid these kinds of plugins things do tend to run more smoothly (And you'll see a BIG difference in load and likely run-time performance).

Rather than trashing out the normal WP VS other system debate, I'll approach this from the view of when I had to learn WP. Around a year ago the agency I work for decided that we needed to stay competitive and offer WP, so it was something I had to learn. Taking a design, to built a custom theme, these were the pain points for me coming from other systems:
Total lack of separation from the view layer to the business logic. You're mixing front-end code with PHP, and it's an absolute mess, difficult to debug, messes up syntax highlighting, and makes anything hard to refactor. There are community efforts to improve this, like WP MVC, and Timber, but they aren't official, and your entire site would be relying on this being maintained for years to come. Beginners being able to easily build themes simply isn't true. Installing a pre-made theme is easy, building one from scratch always results in a lot of confusion, and I think that's mainly because there's no template engine. Once you get past the basic built in methods, you're essentially on your own just writing PHP. This also makes code re-use a nightmare, everything is tightly coupled, and the only choice you have to enforce some kind of DRY principle is to use includes. It makes too many assumptions about the content I want from the get-go. While this is fine for some people, I'd love a button that removes everything I don't need (comments, posts, ect). Instead I use a plugin to clean up the control panel to remove anything that isn't used. I love custom fields, but they aren't much of a consideration in WP. The default method of adding them is difficult, and only supports a tiny amount of field types. Advanced Custom Fields is a saviour, and it's no surprise it's one of the most WP popular plugins out there. This should be treated a core feature, not a second class citizen. Image manipulation is badly thought-out. Adding in new image sizes is difficult, choosing a crop position is impossible, and images should be transformed on the fly. If you make a change to your image size, you need to download a plugin to regenerate every image again, because it crops on upload. If you use the 'edit' feature then it replaces your original image. This is one of the things I'd love them to improve on, it could be so much better because the media library is actually pretty decent. WP doesn't have MVC style routing, and while the default method of fetching pages works for most occasions, if you have a complex URL structure that contains dates, categories ect, it simply won't find the correct template. Absolute URL's stored in the DB makes migrations difficult. I've needed to do a find and replace on a live database a couple of times, it's scary as hell. ---
 
There are plenty of pro's for the system too. The form plugins are really helpful, and the managed hosting options like WP Engine are awesome.
 
I'm currently working on a way to make all of the above less painful, and I think it's ultimately going to come down to using the new WP API. Once i've worked out a good method for building complex themes with the API then i'll definitely be posting about it.

Yes, that helped a bit!
I searched for cors (I did not know how it was called before ) and found several tutorials.
I do not know why, but I had to put "always" in front of set.

Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*" Finally the error message disappeared and I can see Fontawesome!
Thank you!

Previous response summed everything up pretty well. Angular is one of those things which some people feel they MUST learn because they hear a lot of buzz around it, that's when you end up with simple business websites being built using Angular - which makes no sense at all. JS frameworks are often more useful when you're dealing with web applications (SPA / "single page applications") rather than traditional websites (MPA / "multiple page applications"). Interaction with a SPA is closer to how you would interact with traditional computer programs and we have plenty of SPA's being developed these days for everything from SaaS to internal tools. AngularJS is one of those things which makes more sense once you actually need it and at that point, you'll realise just how much time it can save you and how useful it can be.

It's a CORS issue, place this in the <VirtualHost> for your static content:
<FilesMatch ".(eot|ttf|otf|woff)"> Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*" </FilesMatch>

I agree, experience is king. It's interesting you mentioned real world cases - this is one of the best ways to learn. Just keep building websites and each time you come across a case where you're wondering "How do I do this", go and find out. Search Google, ask on forums, there's loads of people out there willing to offer you help online free of charge! Doing this, you will build up ammo in the form of knowledge. Over time you will begin to connect the dots between different solutions and begin to have a higher / more detailed understanding of how things work. In fact, you'll probably reach the point where you start asking yourself not "How do I do this?" but "Which way should I do this?", as there are many ways to do different things in CSS.
 
As for the specific issue you mentioned, look into the position property and z-index property. These may help you resolve the problem, although not necessarily in the "best" way - it's hard to say without seeing code.
 
Keep learning, all the best!

There's no reason why you can access hosted 3rd party scripts locally, so long as you have an internet connect. Alternatively download a local copy for things like Jquery so you can use them when you have no connection.

Hi Mike, welcome

It looks like your dates are store backwards in the DB?
 
MySql dates are normally stored Year/Month/Day which makes sense the way that ordering works.
 
If you were to convert your dates to an int using the function UNIT_TIMESTAMP() you get 0. Where as if you convert this date for example '2015-01-29 00:00:00' it would return '1422489600'.

Well modern php is fun specially using composer for dependencies, try slim or go to laravel you don't need to re-invent the wheel.

Yep. But surprisingly SVG icons are becoming more and more popular with each passing year.
 
 
Premium for free? I don't think so, but you can get usually as creative commons license.
I'm using https://www.iconfinder.com/