[TYPO3] Certificate Maker: GIFBUILDER with db access

[Mark Gillingham]

I'm in over my head and am just about ready to hire someone to help me. 
I'll describe the situation. I want to create a self-serve certificate 
maker in which a user can log-in to a page, see the courses they've 
completed and click on a course title to view an image of a certificate 
with details from the specific course.

Using the PHP Script extension I've written a few lines of PHP to access 
a table to extract fe_user-like information about courses users have 
taken (course_name, course_number, date, etc.).

Using GIFBUILDER (and sticking very close to the Casestory in TSRef), 
I've created a mock-up of the certificate and placed sample data on it 
(example follows).

Next I attempted to make the PHP script conform to PHP_SCRIPT (again, 
following TSRef closely) complete with classes for accessing the db and 
querying it (example follows).

Currently, I'm not getting data from the query, but can pass trivial 
information from the included classes. However, even if I got all of the 
data I wanted, I'm not sure how to place them in the image.

Any advice is appreciated including whom to hire. /mark

page.5 = PHP_SCRIPT
page.5 {
   file = fileadmin/scripts/myquery.inc
   cObj = TEXT
   stdWrap.wrap = <font color="red"> | </font>
   stdWrap.case = UPPER
   }

page.10 = IMAGE
page.10.file = GIFBUILDER
page.10.file {
   XY = 800, [10.h]
   10 = IMAGE
   10.file = fileadmin/template/images/certificate.png
   10.file.width= 800
   20 = TEXT
   20.text = Great Books Foundation
#  20.text.field = title
   20.maxWdith = 700
   20.offset = 0,180
   20.niceText = 1
   20.align = center
   20.fontSize= 30
   20.angle = 0
   20.fontFile = t3lib/fonts/ll.ttf
   20.fontColor = blue
22 = TEXT
   22 {
     text = Course_Name
     offset = 0,210
     niceText = 1
     align = center
     fontSize= 24
     angle = 0
     fontFile = t3lib/fonts/llbold.ttf
     fontColor = blue
   }