Looking for web design software

[Nikkolus]

Hey all,

It's been about 7 years since I've messed with any web design... and boy... a lot has changed! I'm an oldie, I used phpnuke all the time in the past but it isn't what I'm quite looking for now (at least not with some heavy modifications; and it's fairly outdated now by the looks of it.)

This will be a website for a business doing charitable donations for different local groups. The business will have about 40 different users, what the business needs is

-To be able to have the users fill out a web form which will be uploaded to a database, the information submitted on the form can be posted automatically or require administrative approval. This database will be the charity groups and will be viewable to all so the other users know that they are already in the system.

-Have a calendar linked with the database, the business will submit dates they are doing fundraising events with the different groups in the 1st database

-An e-mail form that will be sent to a 3rd party to order marketing supplies for the fundraising event (ie: kinkos for flyers)

-An online excel sheet that embeds inside the webpage pretty much. We have a current spreadsheet that calculates how successful the fundraising event was. If this could import into the database that would be awesome.

-User accounts to login & administration accounts

-Statistics to see which user has the most fundraising events, which was the most successful etc. (A little competition never hurts.)

-Forum in the near future... not quite as important.

It's all pretty much forms & a database... fairly easy, I just don't really know where to start. Which software would you recommend? Free preferable, but I'm willing to spend money too.

Thanks for your help.

[traq]

the best web coding software is a plain text editor. I recommend notepad++ (windows), gedit or kate (Linux) (I don't know about Mac).

If you're looking for something usable "out of the box," I'd recommend using a CMS (like drupal, WP, or Concrete).

[djr33]

On a Mac, I highly recommend Text Wrangler as a plain text editor.

[CrystalSC]

With that many users, Wordpress would probably be a wonderful solution. You can assign as many users to the account as you'd like and they can be assigned roles which give them different levels of control.
WP is very easy to work with and you can get some gorgeous, professional-looking themes for free.