I'm building a site for a school club, seeking to try new things for the experience. Although I know how things generally work (the big picture), I haven't used Javascript, scripting languages, or MySQL in any practical applications. I'm open to using scripts made available by others, though I really would like the experience creating dynamic elements. Past websites I have built from scratch have been static. I am pondering the best ways to implement the following:

1. A slideshow on the home page sliding through images advertising club events.

2. A page with a graphical week-view calendar that displays events within the days.

3. On the home page, a sidebar section showing the next few upcoming events, updated automatically by pulling information from whatever structure would support the calendar.

4. Have an administrative back end where an interface allows one to add events to the calendar.

For the slideshow, Javascript seems obvious to me. I was thinking about using the JQuery library to make the slideshow, but I don't know if that is necessary. Perhaps excessive. Not sure.

The calendar is much more eluding. Thoughts: a database to store events, PHP to read and write events to the calendar page. Basic functionality, though that does not take into account scrolling through weeks and filtering events by type.

It's a bit intimidating, which makes me want to embed a Google Calendar. If I do that, I would need to figure out how I can access scheduled events and post them to the homepage's "Upcoming Events." (Anywhere I can read up on this?) Doing that would eliminate the need for an administrative backend and be most user friendly.

Please help! What are your thoughts?