I have done it! I have fixed the last problem with the query to my database, and I have found and overcome two more problems, one of which was connected to classes in OOP php. I am now three quarters of the way to setting up pagination on this site. That will be a nice change.
I have also mostly set up my photo gallery. All the photos read in to the database from the S3 storage, and I can display them nicely and also weed out the junk files that AWS puts in to the buckets. When I have the photos set up with pagination, I will work out a fwe more weeds with the to do list system, then back to focus on other things like making more cartoon picture to teach English with, moving the rest of my sites over to this MVC that I have going, and then moving into HTML5 games for learning.
After that, the next step I think is to start learning in serious python coding. Moving the database for a site over to a new codebase is not so hard if you already know that database and use it a lot. THe new code will be adapted to it. Much easier than moving to a whole new system, like migrating from drupal to wordpress or something like that.