Php?

[coldraven]

I maintain a web-site for a local charity, it's a lifeboat museum.
I built it all on plain HTML because that's all I knew at the time.
We need to archive lots of images and have an easy way to upload them and for visitors to browse them.
So now I'm planning to totally re-design the site and use PHP to serve the pages.
Is this the way to go?
Is there any pre-made utility that I should be looking at?
Lastly, where should I look for tutorials?
All suggestions are welcome, thanks.

[gopherofdoom]

I can't comment authoritatively on whether PHP is the best way to do what you want, though I suspect it is. But I can tell you that W3Schools does a very good tutorial to learn PHP:
http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp
I dabbled a bit a while ago but never had much occasion to apply it.

EDIT
PS: That said, if you want to go for ease-of-maintaining, perhaps a content management system like Joomla would be most appropriate?

[vehemoth]

If you decide on php there are good tutoprials over at http://w3schools.com/php/default.asp
Or you could try a content management system such as http://drupal.org/

[coldraven]

Thanks gopherofdoom and vehemoth, I've had a quick look at Drupal and Joomla, looks interesting. I'll post back when I have made some progress, this could take a while :)

[Mr. Picklesworth]

So, one of the problems I personally have with PHP is that it's very simple in terms of what it'll do for you, but the CMSs you can throw on top start off quite complex. Powerful, but complex. WordPress is one of the simpler systems, but another thing I have been meaning to use is called CakePHP. It's like Django, if you have used that; a web framework that gives you a template system and some goodies to access a database, but leaving lots up to you. Some people (err, me, obviously) just plain prefer that way of working.

So, many options! :)

Don't let me scare you, though: Drupal is awesome. Just make sure you read up on designing themes / templates for each choice: it will play a big part and some do it very differently than others.

[coldraven]

So, one of the problems I personally have with PHP is that it's very simple in terms of what it'll do for you, but the CMSs you can throw on top start off quite complex. Powerful, but complex. WordPress is one of the simpler systems, but another thing I have been meaning to use is called CakePHP. It's like Django, if you have used that; a web framework that gives you a template system and some goodies to access a database, but leaving lots up to you. Some people (err, me, obviously) just plain prefer that way of working.

So, many options! :)

Don't let me scare you, though: Drupal is awesome. Just make sure you read up on designing themes / templates for each choice: it will play a big part and some do it very differently than others.
Consider me scared :)