First off, I want to say that I am used to doing Procedural Programming as my hobby – I’m trying to learn OOP in a couple languages, and understand the theory, just not the practice.

I have a pet-project I wanted to build, specifically in PHP with a database backend (didn’t care what one). My main reason was for the app to be used on any device, so a WebApp seemed like the logical choice.

I understand that to build maintainable PHP WebApps, it should use OOP, Classes, Frameworks, Libraries, etc. This sounds logical, so I decide to try some of the popular ones. However, after an entire weekend of just trying them and trying to get through the tutorials, I’m left both confused and frustrated trying to adapt the tutorials to my small project.

I decided, mainly for a proof-of-concept, to build the app in another program (Microsoft Access), and accomplished my main goals in only a couple hours – except the Web part.

My question is, should I follow the path of what I know, then try to implement correct coding practices, or should I start with the good coding practices, and try to fudge my way through? For this project, I would like it to be Open Sourced on GitHub, so I would be open to other people using and changing my code, but I also know that if code is written poorly, it would be hard to gather coders to help.