[ Article ] Is PHP Right For You?

[army]

Is PHP Right For You?

Since its development in the mid-90's PHP has become an increasingly popular scripting language. If you're involved in webpage design, it is nearly impossible to avoid discussion of PHP. You may be wondering if learning PHP is the right thing for you and your website.

Just what can PHP do? PHP can do just about whatever you want it to do because it is a server side technology and can accomplish just about everything a CGI program does such as collect data, send and receive cookies, generate dynamic pages and more. Dynamic web pages are web pages that return custom content to a user based on the results of a query, search or other request.

PHP is not limited to merely outputting HTML either. It can output images, PDF files, flash movies, text, XML and more. PHP supports numerous databases and offers extensions and ODBC connectivity to any other database not currently supported. PHP also offers functions useful for e-commerce and various online payment programs such as Cybercash and Verisign. With a little imagination and a few PHP programming skills, you'll be surprised at how versatile PHP is.

So let's answer the question, is PHP right for you? If you want to add dynamic content to your web site or incorporate a complex database and are willing to learn a fairly easy to learn scripting language, then the answer is yes, PHP is right for you. Using PHP gives you the ability to create an interactive and dynamic page without the need of purchasing expensive software. But of course, you will need to learn how to format and enter the PHP codes and scripts into your HTML.

The good news is, if you already are comfortable with other languages such as C, java, or Perl, PHP is easy to understand and learn. It uses many of the same conventions and structures as these other programming languages. It is an open source language so it is free and it comes with a ton of resources and a vibrant PHP community on the internet to help you ease your way into it.

[r00t]

army, you wrote a great article

[army]

Thanks mate .

Btw, welcome (again ) to Betlik .

[r00t]

yeah thanks dude

i love to be with you

[babuks]

Army is awesome. He always provide something useful.

[charlesbw]

And your article is definitely true, i have spent about 1.5 years putting sites together, usually for clans i ran or helped run. started with those *cough* auto create sites, then auto nuke then installing my own nuke and knowing what else to do if an error occured, and now i can edit minor things but am trying to learn how to write or combine already written scripts to make what i want. maybe you could answer some of my questions or help me achieve what i want to know so i can finish this site am working on.

[nilzerous]

It'll surely boost up confidence of the newbies.

[army]

Originally Posted by charlesbw

And your article is definitely true, i have spent about 1.5 years putting sites together, usually for clans i ran or helped run. started with those *cough* auto create sites, then auto nuke then installing my own nuke and knowing what else to do if an error occured, and now i can edit minor things but am trying to learn how to write or combine already written scripts to make what i want. maybe you could answer some of my questions or help me achieve what i want to know so i can finish this site am working on.

Yeah, I know what you mean . I used to do it as well . I even ran a full clan myself, with complete site I made. Partly in PHP, but because of curcomstances, I never finished the site in PHP, so now I got a half PHP-clan-site with some bugs lol.
But if you need any help please ask me .

And also remember this: most scripts are already written . Try to look for them, and change them a little b it to your needs . That safes you a lot of work (and about a lot of work, I am talking as experienced man lol, I made the fault to want to start from zero, and not use already made scripts).

[Renegade Bladesman]

PHP is fastly growing in popularity among scripters and designers, however... there are not that many hosts that will allow PHP or any dynamic scripting on their sites. Geocities is a prime example for that. I'm thankful to have discovered PHP because it's made doing things a whole lot easier, especially in terms of mail and file upload

[army]

Originally Posted by Renegade Bladesman

PHP is fastly growing in popularity among scripters and designers, however... there are not that many hosts that will allow PHP or any dynamic scripting on their sites. Geocities is a prime example for that. I'm thankful to have discovered PHP because it's made doing things a whole lot easier, especially in terms of mail and file upload

Excuse me? Almost all hosts accept PHP. Only some (few) FREE hosts do not accept PHP.