PHP Newbie

what programs and options

[zeus]

I only make static pages, but now I want to play a little with dynamic pages, where you can make changes on all sites in minuts,passwords,forums,...

Is there a program like frontpage where such things are possible, I know many hate that software, but I have great succes with it or is there other options.

zeus

[Bonusbana]

I started with a couple of books, www.php.net, a text-editor and a host that supports php and mySql. Simple things like guestbooks and photologs are great stuff to start with. Tutorials are everywhere on the web.

PHP is a programming language, the best you can do is to learn to code it the "real" way - using a text-editor and a lot of patience. I have never used any off-line applications to generate PHP code.

Good luck

[tresmom5]

I'm really really new at this myself, but I am starting to get a few things. I finally decided to make myself learn it. I originally learned html before I ever had any programs. Knowing it makes it so much easier to fix things. I figure php will be the same way. Now, that I have dreamweaver, I don't do html as much, but I do know how to. With php, I've just taken on a little bit of info at the time, played around with it, and it's slowly sinking in. It is not as quick and easy to learn as html, but it can be done especially if you're like me and only wanting to learn the basics.

Teresa

[mincklerstraat]

There is a program that can make php coding for you called dreamweaver. It's real nice for making websites, but you really *should not* use it for php since you won't have any idea what it's doing, dreamweaver won't make the code the way you want it to be, and you'll come here and post 200 lines of code that nobody can read that was made with dreamweaver and nobody will want to help you, since you don't know what's up with your code yourself.

SO: php is phenomenally easy to learn. Get a book in paper, and go to apachefriends.org to get the server stuff to put on your computer. Use dreamweaver for your HTML if you want, but stay away from it for PHP. Write your PHP yourself.

[zeus]

Ok thanks I do have dreamweaver, text editor,apache server and sql, so now I only need a book.

thanks

zeus

[mack]

sometimes following a good book is the best way to learn a new scripting language. The importaint thing is to make sure you dont just leap ahead and try to hop right in at the advanced sections. I made that mistake ages ago and by the time I had finished the book I basicaly had to go back to the start to get to grips with the basics. Long way for a short cut.

Once you start to get to grips with the basic of the language it certainly does open up a whole new window of oppertunity. It's quite amazing what you can do with only basic knowledge.

Mack.

[ergophobe]

If you can't hand code HTML yet, you can still get some good basic benefit from switching to dynamic scripting by doing the following.

- create a sample page just as you normally would in FP. Okay, the code might be a mess, but you can fix that later.

- now break out chunks of it that will appear on all pages and save them in separate files - header, footer, navigation in their own directory, say "shared" or "layout" or something.

the my_page.php looks like this

<?
include('/home/site/shared/header.inc.php');
?>

<div class="content"> All my brilliant commentary and ingenious content goes here</div>

<?
include('/home/site/shared/footer.inc.php');
?>

Thats sort of the simplest case, but it's a way to get your feet wet and it already saves you lots of maintenance headaches - change one file and all of your headers change. From there you can learn bit by bit until you have php doing all kinds of things you had never imagined.

Tom