Reddit reviews Learning PHP, MySQL, and Javascript (Animal Guide)

A great book for beginners

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript

If you have any experience with manipulating tables in general then learning how to use a (MySQL) database is relatively intuitive, provided that you aren't concerned with optimization issues such as normalizing tables, scaling problems down the road, or managing any fancy relationships. I'm sorry for how demoralizing this sounds but... based on the needs you've described you could probably teach yourself all you'd need for that project and how to interact with a MySQL database via PHP in less time than its taken you jump through all these hoops trying to use Google spreadsheets.

Here's a good and relatively cheap book on the matter.

I read that book as a CS undergrad before taking any database classes and it helped quite a bit; in particular the chapters on MySQL are very concise and easy to read. Even if you've never seen PHP before just seeing MySQL syntax for the first time hopefully leads to a "oh well duh that's all very intuitive" moment. Hopefully it will help give you a better understanding of the larger picture and how these languages interact with each other.

Note: There are tons of other great, free resources online that you can peruse at your leisure without paying for a book.

I had the same problem as you, tried Drupal and Joomla but I found it was too difficult to tailor them to my needs (basically, creating an online catalog of pictures, an email form and some static pages). Finally I ended learning pure PHP+MySQL from a book and it worked pretty good for me.

PS: English is not my native language so... excuse me for any mistakes ;)

I'm going to assume you're a complete newbie. I'm only a few steps ahead of you, really, but I can share some advice. I've always felt like 75% of the battle is figuring out what to learn when it comes to scripting or computer languages in general. And a lot of time, even cutting edge, comprehensive sources are outdated within a few years and, if you follow their advice, you may expose yourself to security concerns. Like leapyquacky said, the question is a bit vague, but I'm going to assume you want employees to access a page with user-specific credentials so no employee can impersonate another, etc:

1. PDOs/prepared statements are the best way to connect to the DB. The PDO documentation will help immensely. It should be easy enough if you've ever done any OOP. The reason for this -- and this is really paramount, especially if it's on the internet -- is the risk of SQL injections.
   
   
2. To maintain any semblance of security, you'd need to hash your users' passwords, and likely with something a little more secure than MD5. There's an excellent article on Openwall about this. You'd need a hash, a salt, and minimum length/complexity requirements for your passwords. This is just not good practice, it's essential if you store anything sensitive.
   
   
3. You'd be using sessions to maintain state across your pages. The best videos I can think of on sessions are behind a paywall, but the documentation should get you pretty far. phpacedemy on YouTube has a few videos on sessions, if I recall. Just remember, if you're using YouTube to learn about sessions, a lot of those videos are dated and the security practices won't be ideal. If you see them connecting to their DB using mysql_connect, this is the case. Listen to the session advice, but don't use that function unless you care to get pretty technical about escaping user input.
   
   
4. You're going to need levels of access on the page -- admin, general, etc., so you can protect information and actions that need to be secure. You'd probably also want a running log of all the changes your users made to the database.
   
   
5. None of this stuff will make much sense unless you're familiar with PHP. The documentation is great, but I recommend reading a good book on it, bearing in mind that whatever you read could be out of date. (Hint: Argh, matey, thar be a website that may get yeh the book yeh want withou' yer payin'.)
   
   It's not hard but it requires a scattershot of understanding that may take a little while to really get. I know it did for me, anyway. Once you have that going on, you'll probably have more specific questions. Lookin' forward to it.
   

TL:DR but I agree with the headings. HTML, CSS, php, MySQL, js. In fact I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0596157134. For some layout examples use Chromes Inpector to study other peoples sites and play with frameworks such as http://html5boilerplate.com/ and http://blueprintcss.org/. There are lots of great tutorials to get your feet wet with js and php scripts. In fact the book I suggested has awesome scripts you create that are reusable throughout lots of page designs.

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-JavaScript-Step-Step/dp/0596157134/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_1_0

I recommend the above. What you want sounds pretty easy, and this book could get you there in just a few days.

buy this book: http://www.amazon.com/Learning-MySQL-JavaScript-Step-Step/dp/0596157134
and never look back.
If you want to go beyond any basic template for wordpress or anything else, you should check out PHP a little bit. Its super fucking easy.