This guide is meant for absolute beginners to PHP; someone who's already familiar with regular HTML and CSS, and is willing to take his websites to the next level. PHP is server-side scripting which means that the code is executed at the server before it reaches a browser. This also means that our first step will be setting up a type of server on your home PC.

It seems the forums here at Wgg don’t get a lot of screen-time, so I’ve decided to expand on a long lost forum topic to compare two alternatives to regular old MySQL database accessing in PHP. I will be looking at MySQLi, where the ‘i’ stands for improved, and SQLite, where the ‘ite’ stands for light.

I’m not sure on what nerd-level you put yourself, but I feel sincerely handicapped if I don’t have my computer at my disposal with my code editor and apache service running. It happens quite often that I come up with new ideas for programming or I just have the urge to test something out, and I’m on a computer where it’s not feasible to install all the software and services I need to test these things out. I actually have a couple pages in a notebook (the paper kind) covered with code snippets. I give you the solution.

Even after a few years of experience, I am still discovering more hidden powers in PHP every once in a while. If you have a look at some of my older posts, you’ll see a sort of learning curve happening. Currently I’m in the process of mastering a more OO approach, even if it’s just the database handling. There are, however, a few things I would like to share with you, things you might have been doing the long way before, and now find out that those 15 lines of code can easily be just 3 lines.

Pretty URLs are increasingly popular. Not only are huge website businesses implementing them, but smalltime web designers are equally striving for that good look in the address bar in your explorer. This article is a follow up based on the comments of my previous story Pretty URLs (How to). I wasn’t planning on this sequel, that’s why part 1 doesn’t say “Part 1”.

When creating web sites for clients, it is not uncommon that you will need to create online submission forms. Luckily, with a bit of PHP and HTML we can create a slick form in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, as is the case with most programming languages, if something can be done easily then there is very likely a catch. As nice as it is to have a cool contact form embedded in your website, it is only a matter of time until you become popular.

As in 10,000 submissions popular.

Here's a question, let's say the method for signing up for my new website would be to register your email address, and then you get a link to follow in your email, and then you complete the rest of the registration.

I want to make it so that these entries expire, meaning that if somebody gives their email address, but then never follows the link to register, that entry will eventually disappear.

Pretty URLs are good to have. People like pretty. There are various ways to accomplish this, but I will go over a simple way that I’ve personally never heard before. That means I invented it, even though many other people have already invented it, but never told me.

I have a website that was originally written entirely in HTML (and CSS). This was originally done intentionally and there were good reasons for sticking to HTML. But, over time, site maintenance has become increasingly complex and time consuming, so I began the task of migrating the site to PHP. The main reason for moving to PHP was to use ‘include’ statements so that the menus, logos, headers, footers etc. were all in one place so the whole site can be updated more easily. So how easy is it to move to php? Actually much easier than you might expect!

When creating the content for a website you probably notice that some parts of the text (such as your company name, or page title) are used many times in many pages. Imagine if you wanted to change one of these names, or add a little ® at the end of your company name at each occurance, you would have to search your entire content and replace them. You might miss one or two, and suffer inconsistancies!

With PHP you can easily create text variables that show everywhere in your text. Then if you wanted to change something, you only change it in one place in a single file, and your entire website is updated!