@cy2,
I think you have come to the right place with Wappler. I’ll give you a brief history of my experiences throughout the years as an IT person.
When I started working for the company I am now, eleven years ago, I took over as the IT guy because the one they had left the company, similar to your situation. The previous IT guy utilized Microsoft Frontpage with an Access database hosted locally on his server in his house.
Like a lot of people, I went through a process of examination and decision-making on how to best design a website that met our company needs. Not knowing ASP.net, the code utilized by the prior IT guy, I initially looked for a content management system (CMS) that would fit our needs.
As discussed by others in other posts on this website, I started with Joomla, then when it did not meet our needs, moved to Drupal. When it did not meet our needs, I switched again to Wordpress. While Wordpress still meets our needs, I have watched as our website has gotten slower and slower and as @psweb mentioned, full of bloated code that serves no purpose.
A couple years ago, I started looking at the DMX Zone extensions utilizing Dreamweaver, but never really had the time to devote to developing a completely new website from scratch. When Dreamweaver removed the native database tools, I will be honest, I gave up on it.
Wappler has been relatively easy to understand and use. The support on this website is unmatched and very quick when you have an issue or need help figuring out what to do.
While I am not an expert, I can offer the following advice on how to proceed. First, look through the Wappler documentation, https://docs.wappler.io/. You will refer to this A LOT as you learn how to use Wappler. Second, I would recommend the following two websites, which have video tutorials on various aspects of Wappler:
As with the Wappler documentation, I refer to the above two websites quite often as I learn how to do things. One thing to note, that as great as the above two video tutorial websites are, Wappler has and will continue to be upgraded with new features, so some things might not be exactly as in the video, but it is close enough for you to understand how to do things.
To address your specific questions regarding the database, I would recommend MySQL as well. While there are other options, that is the most common database people use (as far as I can see).
Using Wappler, you should not need to learn JSON or even touch the JSON files. Almost everything in Wappler has been designed to be visual, so you will use the tools in Wappler to connect to the database, insert records, update records, and delete records. Your end users should not need to do anything in the code itself, it should be handled via the front end of the website using secure logins as mentioned by @Teodor.
I hope this helps you out.