Querying & Rendering database queries

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I’m very new to website development and C5 and am trying to build a plant nursery site with potentially 100s of plants for browsing. The aim is for the user to either browse the entire collection or specify search rules to narrow the results. The results I need to display will be at least 1 picture (thumbnail with a zoom out to the full picture) and a set of details extracted from the database for each matched entry.

I’m happy with basic SQL (and database structures) and I’m sure I can get the hang of PHP, but what I’m not seeing too well at the moment is exactly how to put this all together. I’ve seen a few posts around that touch on what I’m trying to do, such as how to access and query the database from PHP, but not much on how the input of such a query can be collected from the user (probably a form), passed to the query and the results passed back from the query to a C5 page (or series of pages) for rendering.

I’ve seen the C5 eCommerce add-on and selling of said plants after selection is also a possibility in the future, but I’d rather not fork out for the add-on yet as the business is not capable of responding to this as yet (and maybe never). Can I easily integrate it later when the business is ready or am I doubling up on functionality? Can the buying option be turned off so it’s just a search and browse tool? Lot of money just for that at this stage as far as I’m concerned.

So if someone could give me some general guidelines on where to get started, ie the search details form, passing the details to PHP for the query, rendering the results of the query, where do I put the PHP code to do this and the query, I would be very grateful, or point me to articles already in place that I’ve missed or other resources (books). It’s quite a lot to ask I admit, but some ideas to get me started in the right direction would be great. Thanks.