Web site programming suggestions

So, last semester I took Web Dev 1 were we learned HTML and CSS. I am currently using an online video guide at www.thenewboston.com (awesome website) to relearn HTML (5 this time).

This semester, we did some c# with ASP.NET MVC which was a lot of fun.

What do you guys think is the best method for web development? At TheNewBoston.com they have guides on all types of stuff, and I may want to switch over to one that will work on the Linux server space that I currently have (ASP.NET doesnt work on Linux)

What do you mean by method?

I've only worked with the Linux based stack, it seems to make the most sense. If I was going to write in ASP that'd be Microsoft for sure, some of Microsoft's cloud initiatives, like Azure, are interesting. If I needed cloud for any kind of *nix stack I'd go with Amazon's services.

But in regards to what works it depends on language and what you want to do. Typically you should stick away from ready to go frameworks for sites that are going to deal with a decent level of load. Frameworks are fine for small websites but I wouldn't want to build the next digg or Facebook on one of them.

We run PHP with MySQL on CentOS here. The forums (phpBB) are a hybrid of object-oriented PHP and procedural PHP. We use custom home written classes for things like database access and highscore management. From there most of what we do is written in terms of basic procedural PHP using functions. I've tried to write completely using object oriented PHP but it wasn't as elegant as the hybrid solution which we use now. PHP was not designed to be an Object-Oriented language, those features were added later. Because of this it's natural that PHP excels at procedural programming.

PHP doesn't really work well for true MVC (model-view-controller) because each time a page is loaded up everything is set up to be executed in one shot. It's not often that state is saved across sessions in an easy to manage way with PHP. Because of this I tend to think of the database as my model coupled with helper functions to manipulate data. The controller layer is the page that you guys access, handles db access and loading up templates. For the view aspect I use hybrid HTML-PHP pages with PHP embedded for templating focusing on only the template based aspects with the helper functions I've written in the controller layer.

But of course we do have some pages that are straight up procedural PHP.