PHP(Personal
Home Pages)
Baby steps to dynamic web building with an open source scripting language.
So you know HTML. But there are some features in your website that HTML cannot implement on its own. Say, you want a feedback form through which your site visitors can contact you or you may want an online guest book where your visitors can submit their comments about your site. You may also wish to create a Login Form and allow only those visitors that have a username and password, to enter your
site. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? implementation of features such as feedback Forms and
Guest books etc. is termed as "Web Development". You may have heard of ASP (Active Server Pages), JSP (Java Server Pages), Perl, CGI (Common Gateway Interface), CFML (Cold Fusion Markup Language) and PHP (Hypertext
Preprocessor). They are all famous scripting languages for web development.
Why PHP?
There are plenty of reasons for using PHP. Some of these are:
It is free and multi-platform ! Other languages are very expensive and platform dependent.
It is easy to use and at the same time very powerful.
Any special qualification is not required to learn PHP. If you know HTML, you can learn PHP.
Installing a web server
Any scripting language requires a web server to be installed on a computer. A web server is a software that lets a scripting language perform various web development tasks.
For PHP, we will use a web server called FoxSer. You can download the installer for Microsoft Windows from the foxServ Website.
http://www.foxserv.net
The installer is one big file (around 30 mb), so be patient. It is highly recommended to use modem and robust operating system like MS Windows 2000, NT or XP for a Web Server.
Windows 98 and ME aren't considered a good choice as they crash a lot and often do not let the web server work properly. If you are using Windows 98 or ME, you should install Windows 2000, NT or XP. If you are an advanced user and have installed Microsoft IIS, you should uninstall it or stop it.
After downloading the foxser installer file double click it. The setup will start. Just keep clicking 'Next' untill the installer starts copying files. When the installation is close to 100% completion, a series of dialog boxes will appear asking for different minor details. Just keep clicking OK without changing anything. In the end, check all the three options that appear on the screen and click 'Finish'. Another dialog box will appear labeled something like
'WinMySQLAdmin' asking for a username and password. This is a username and password for the database (we won't talk about database here). Write a username and password you like and click OK. And that's all to it! You have installed a web server on your computer.
A traffic signal icon appear in the task bar. Don't close it. Let it continue to run. Now, open internet Explorer
or your favorite web browser and type the following in the address bar.
http://localhost
Make sure that ' Work Offline' is not checked in the File Menu of the browser. If that is the case, uncheck the 'Work Offline' option from the File Menu by clicking on it again and then open
http://localhost.
A web page will appear with something about 'FoxSer' written on it. Congratulations, your Web Server installed is successful.
Your First PHP Script
Now you are ready to write your first-ever PHP script. Open your favorite text editor (e.g. Notepad or Wordpad) and write the following lines in it:
<html>
<head>
<title> My First PHP Script </title>
</head>
<body>
<? print "<h1>New Web Zone Network Service</h1>"; ?>
</body>
</html>
Save this file as "first.php" in the location "C:\foxserv\www\" folder, otherwise it will not work.
The path "C:\foxserv\www\" is the root directory of the Foxserv web server. A root directory is a special directory in the web server, which holds all the files that are to be accessed using the 'localhost' address in the address bar of web browser. From now on, it is assumed that you save all the files in the root directory i.e. "C:\foxserv\www\".
If the web browser is not open, open it and type the following address in the address bar:
http://localhost/first.php
A heading will appear saying "New Web Zone Network Service". You have successfully created your first-ever PHP
script. Now that you have created your script, it's necessary to understand it. So lets just come back to the script.
1. Most of the code written is pure HTML. The only new thing is some weird looking stuff between the two 'body' tags (<body></body>).Yes, you guessed it right: Its PHP. When you write PHP code, you are actually writing HTML files with PHP code embedded or glued to HTML. The tags "<?" and "?>" identify that anything between them is PHP code. The term 'print' on line 7 is a special command that orders the web server to print the
text that is followed by it. In this case, the 'print' command orders the web server to
print 'New Web Zone Network Service' on the screen in the form of a heading. Note that you can also use other HTML tags inside of 'print' command.
The general syntax of the 'print' command is:
print "Anything you want to print";
Like 'print', PHP has many different commands that perform different actions.
In PHP, any directive given to the web server is called a "statement". In First Page, the entire line 7 is a statement. Always remember that a PHP statement must end with a semi-colon (;) as shown on line 7 of First Page. If you forget to type the semi-colon at the end of the statement, the PHP script will generate an error.
PHP Guestbook
→Here is an example of PHP Guestbook and also can be downloaded.
Click Here To Download PHP Guestbook
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