Please suggest things a newbie may consider for a new site

What should I use php for?

[Rightz]

Hi,

I'm putting together a new travel site (on one country) at the moment. I raw code html but haven't really touched on php yet but am willing to learn.

I want to have a large site over time.

I have looked into using SSI includes for a menu and have realised that there are lot of tricks I can use to make it easier to update my site in the future.

PHP seems like the prefered and simpliest choice on ww.

What scripts would you recommend looking into when creating a site to make it simpler in the long run?

Is there anything you wished you did when putting it online that would have saved you time?

Thanks

Emma :)

[barns101]

The main benefit will be using includes for page headers, menus etc... You could also database your content to make it searchable.

[Rightz]

Is that SQL? PHP? (How would I search for a 'for dummies' explaination of that on google?!

[barns101]

You would use the PHP include() function to include your menus etc...

<?php
include("/path/to/includes/menu.htm");
?>

The most popular database is MySQL, which can be accessed using PHP. Take a look at phpMyAdmin [phpmyadmin.net] for setting up tables and administering your database. There are loads of tutorials available that explain PHP/MySQL use.

[Rightz]

Thanks for the advice. Something I'll look into. Anyone else?

:)

[jatar_k]

There are a lot of benefits to using some type of scripting on your site. PHP is avaible with most hosts and it is easy and straight forward to set up a development environment on your own machine. There are also a lot of free scripts around for most things you would need to do. There is also a lot of places to ask for help when coding, like right here. ;)

These threads might demonstrate a few things
A dynamic site in 2 minutes [webmasterworld.com]
Installing a new web server: Apache2, PHP5, MySQL4 and PHPmyAdmin. [webmasterworld.com]

there are other threads in our Library [webmasterworld.com] that might help as well