Re: Tool to dynamically serve Web site from MySQL database
> HTML5, CSS, javascript, AJAX -- not in my toolkit.
Well, they're the tools you need!
Well, you can get by with HTML4, it'll always work.
But you need PHP or an equivalent language to generate dynamic HTML, CSS to abstract away configurable presentation elements, AJAX to speed up on-the-fly database lookups and validations, and JavaScript to validate form input, write those AJAX bits, and teach your app to configure itself to the user's device.
It may look intimidating from where you're sitting, but none of these languages is anywhere near as difficult to learn or use efficiently as C++ or even C. Neither is the combination. Even for AJAX, which has a reputation for being finicky, there are lots of good online working examples with cogent explanations.
Best advice probably is to start with an online PHP-MySQL tutorial or three. Write a bunch of little test programs. It used to be said that it took 600 hours to learn your first program language, 100 to learn the next. Even if you've never written procedural or O-O code, you can be productive in PHP in just a dozen hours or so. If you know something like Cobol or Fortran or C, it'll be that much easier.
I agree with Rick about Frameworks. The trade is: learn our framework instead of learning PHP, CSS, HTML and Javascript. Trouble is, you have to understand PHP, CSS, HTML and Javascript to use the framework intelligently, and now you have the additional problem of learning the framework, which is never simple and is likely more buggy than any of the underlying languages.