How to code your first PHP Web Page
PHP is one of the most popular programming languages for web development. It is offered nearly ubiquitously on shared hosting platforms. Many of the world’s leading content management systems, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Prestashop and lots of other most visited sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, Baidu, Yahoo!, Tumblr, Flickr, MailChimp, Fotolia, Digg, iStockPhoto and many more are written in PHP. Fortunately for developers, learning PHP is not exceptionally challenging. Like learning any skill it requires practice and patience. The first step is to understand what PHP is. Then the next step is to learn how to write a simple PHP web page.
[bctt tweet=”How to code your first PHP Web Page”]All PHP pages are executed on the server. When a user visits your PHP page with their web browser, the web server opens and reads your PHP script. It then prepares an output to send to the web browser. For this reason, PHP scripts typically include database calls and business logic calculations. These are typical aspects of your site that you want to hide from the general public. You don’t want anyone to be able to see your database structure, as that may give them ideas on how to hack it. These scripts also frequently handle form submissions as well. When you fill out a web form online, you may be sending that information to a PHP script for insertion into the user database.
PHP Usage Stats:
PHP is the scripting language of future. As reported by various aggregators and surveys like one by W3Techs PHP is one of the top most scripting language used worldwide. Moreover, its popularity and usage is increasing day by day with every new version.
In order to run PHP applications, you will need to have a web server that is configured to serve these types of pages. If you have a shared hosting environment, this will typically be included as part of your hosting package. If you have cloud hosting, you may need to install both Apache and PHP to see your pages. Windows users can install a software package called XAMPP to get a both a PHP web server and database on their local computer. Similarly, Mac OS X users can install MAMP which includes a PHP server and database. These are free and simple methods of installing an environment to run and test your PHP pages.
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Syntax of PHP:
The syntax of PHP is relatively simple. Code your web page as you normally would, but all PHP code must be enclosed in “”. The following program outputs “Hello World” into your web browser.
Save the above code to a file called example1.php and upload it to your web server. Then visit that page in your web browser. You will see “Hello World” on your screen.
PHP contains far more exciting features than just outputting static text. Variables store values within a PHP script, and they are defined with dollar signs in front of them. Therefore, “$number” can hold a value such as 1 or -10. The following code adds four and five. The result is displayed to the user.
Functions are a way of defining common routines or calculations so that the same code doesn’t need to be written in multiple locations. Each function has input parameters and a returned value. The following code defines a function that takes two numbers as input parameters and returns the sum of them.
The following code uses the function above to display the results of four plus five and six plus seven.
PHP is a very versatile and advanced scripting language that is capable of handling from basic php web pages to advanced web applications. Database-driven web pages, user authentication, and shopping carts can easily be coded through PHP. It is also a highly marketable job skill as many companies rely on full-time PHP developers to power their web infrastructure. Learning PHP enables you to build powerful websites for any idea. you may also read PHP cheat sheet.
If you don’t want to learn PHP: If you want to start your career as a Web Designer or need to have your own website but don’t want to learn PHP and HTML/CSS just download TemplateToaster to create your own website. It is a web design software for designing stunning WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Prestashop and Blogger Themes. I hope you enjoyed this article, let me know your thoughts through comments.
Complete Tutorial to Build a Website with PHP
This tutorial is devoted to aspiring developers, programmers, beginners, students who want to learn about web development and building dynamic website.
This is a self-learning and step-by-step tutorial, based on my experiance to begin developing web applications.
Actually, I have been programming for long time. I have worked on many proejcts and systems before. I have used different languages and frameworks. In beginning, I have no idea of programming. I have searched and learned a lot of things but I was totally confused because I don’t know where and how to begin. It was really challenging for me.
So based on my experiance, I have created this tutorial and sharing with you to help to learn how to begin writing code easily and know the basic principles of web programming. I am sure, you will enjoy it and start making web applications.
Key to learn programming faster:
You also need to know the basics of these:
1. HTML — is the standard markup language used for creating web pages.
2. CSS — is the language that used to style HTML elements.
3. PHP — is a server-side scripting language used to make web pages dynamic and interactive.
4. MySQL — is a database management system based on Structured Query Language (SQL). It is used in web applications for storing, manipulating and retrieving data into database.
For above, I have a simple definition:
- HTML, CSS: These are used as Front-End.
- PHP, MySQL: These are used as Back-End or Server side.
Let’s start with installation
To run PHP, you need a local web server. So you need to install WAMP(Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) or LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) on your computer.
Here in this tutorial, I will use XAMPP, a window based web server. So I need to install this on my computer to run PHP code.
Just download XAMPP Installer from the link given below:
Then run the installer file and continue installation. Here is screenshots to follow the installation steps:
Click the Next button to continue the installation.
Select the componenet that you want to install and click the Next button to continue.
Here you can select the path where would you like to install XAMPP. Click the Next button to continue.
It will will begin the initial installation. Click the Next button to continue.
XAMPP will start installing. Wait untill instalation complete.
Once installation completed, click the Finish button to complete the installation.
Finally, you need oepn XAMPP control panel and start Apache and MySQL by just clicking the Start button.
Let’s Start Coding PHP website
Now you’re ready to start coding your website. You need a code editor to write your programs. There many options you can choose on internet but I prefer to use Visual Studio Code which is a ligthweight and great for coding. You can download from link below.
After installing editor, you need to go XAMPP installation directory and then go to the htdocs folder.
C:\Program Files\XAMPP\htdocs
Then inside htdocs folder, you need to create your website folder. Here created as php-website.
C:\Program Files\XAMPP\htdocs\php-website
Then, open your website folder in your Visual Studio Code editor and create a new file inside the website folder and name it index.php
C:\Program Files\XAMPP\htdocs\php-website\index.php
we will write the HTML for our website in our index.php file.
Now we will run our website by copy paste below url in browser.
The website page loaded and displaying content without style as styling not done. We will create CSS to style it.
Now we will manage code for our website as there all html code in a single file, so we will create separate file for each section (Header, Menus, Footer) to avoid duplicacy and use these files in our website pages. We will create header.php, footer.php and menu.php file.
So now the file sctruture of our website will be:
We will open header.php and put header HTML code.
We will open menu.php and put menu HTML code.
We will open footer.php and put footer HTML code.
We will create style.css and write CSS to add design to our website.
* < box-sizing: border-box; >body < font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0; >.header < padding: 10px; text-align: left; background: #10b7e4; color: white; >.header h1 < font-size: 40px; >.navbar < overflow: hidden; background-color: #333; position: sticky; position: -webkit-sticky; top: 0; >.navbar a < float: left; display: block; color: white; text-align: center; padding: 14px 20px; text-decoration: none; >.navbar a.right < float: right; >.navbar a:hover < background-color: #ddd; color: black; >.navbar a.active < background-color: #666; color: white; >.row < display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; -ms-flex-wrap: wrap; flex-wrap: wrap; >.side < -ms-flex: 30%; flex: 30%; background-color: #f1f1f1; padding: 20px; >.main < -ms-flex: 70%; flex: 70%; background-color: white; padding: 20px; >/* Footer */ .footer < padding: 20px; text-align: center; background: #ddd; >@media screen and (max-width: 700px) < .row < flex-direction: column; >> @media screen and (max-width: 400px) < .navbar a < float: none; width: 100%; >>
Now our index.php file will be like this:
Again, we will load our website in browser and the website will look like:
The content of our website is still static. So now we will load it dynamically from Database.
We will access MySQL using URL https://localhost/phpmyadmin and create database name as my_website.
We will create table content into database.
The structure of our table content will be following:
we will insert record into our table content to display content in index.php file.
Now we have data in our database table and we will retrieve it to display on home page of our website.
Now we will create will create our data connection file connection.php into include directory to make connection to our database.
We will include connection file in index.php file and write PHP code to retrieve records to display from table content.
Now our final index.php file will be following:
Finally, You can now test the output going through the url. It will display like loading content dynamically from database:
That’s it. I hope you have enjoyed it!
You can download complete source code from here.