From what I have seen of the MVRT website's backend, I think he took a number of publically availible scripts and modified them.
Its quite a bit easier than making them yourself.
I believe the person who made the graphics has now left us, so I'm not sure he can answer that question... MVRT uses only js/css for the mouseovers (I think)
If I were you (which I'm not... but anyway) I would suggest you just dive in and play around with PHP. (Provided that is the language you want to go with.) I use a PHP IDE (
http://www.maguma.com/products/studi...o_overview.php) which is basically like a glorified notepad with syntax coloring and lots of ease of use kind of things. PHP comes with pretty amazing documention online, so erm yah. Looking at other people's code ("borrowing" as needed) really helped me get started.
Good luck whatever you decide to do...