internal search engine

OK, I'm back. And not much further along. The site I will be rebuilding is
www.ronfisher.com. I have purchased a manual on MySQL and am slugging through
it. Their recommendation is setting up a database in 1st and second normal
form but that the primary key should be all numbers, no letters. Our product
numbers contain both. Someone mentioned Google site search but it seems that
would open it up to sites beyond this one which the client will NOT want. The
spry tutorials seem to be a good way to display the items but I'm not seeing a
search engine as part of that. I will ultimately need large product photos
after the search shows them 3 or 4 across. I will need a search for "tables" to
search across several catagories ranging from dining table to occasional tables
so the search within just one category (spry galleries) doesn't seem practical.
Do I need to continue to learn MySQL or am I wasting my time? It seems as
though I should be able to enter all the data into the tags of each product
page and then run something similar to a "find>table."

Their recommendation is setting up a database in 1st and second normal form
but that the
primary key should be all numbers, no letters. Our product numbers contain
both.

What they are recommending is using surrogate keys. That is, the key field has
no meaning other than to uniquely identify the row. The product number would be
an attribute (column) in the table.

Someone mentioned Google site search but it seems that would open it up to
sites beyond this one which the client will NOT want.

You can use the Google search API with a server side scripting language to
control exactly what gets searched. You need to already have acquired a the
SOAP API key, which is unlikely, but they are giving out AJAX keys:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/signup.html

Do I need to continue to learn MySQL or am I wasting my time?

I would use a database for a product catalog site like this. This will require
that you learn solid database design techniques, sql, and server side
programming. It sounds like this may be over your head at this time and you may
want to subcontract this part or pass on the project.

Heya Mustang,

Check out
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/samples/data_region/NonDestructiveFil
terSample.html for example of spry search. View and study source code.

Hope that helps!

I have installed MAMP and set it. After a few problems with getting the PHP
working I was referred to the site Enabling PHP and Apache in Leopard
http://foundationphp.com/tutorials/php_leopard.php
I was then questioning how exactly this all works with Dreamweaver and was
referred to the site at Adobe, Building your first dynamic website. They
recommend setting the port to 80 but when I do that I loose the green light
that it is running. So I set it back to 8888 and ran the tutorial but I then
get an error message when I run the tutorial test. What should the port be set
to and is that the probable cause of this error message?