Tuesday, September 04, 2007

I might grow to love PHP

In my course for becoming a web-master in the near future, I've been learning a lot about PHP lately. It's the first server-based programming language I've been introduced to - and it seems to be extremely useful. So I think I might grow to really love it.


PHP, as I was informed in the beginning of this part of my course, is a language for dynamic website programming. HTML, CSS and JavaScript on the other hand are languages for static website programming. The different is easy to describe. A static website is created once and will always look the same - pretty much like my websites which are currently build with HTML, some CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. Dynamic websites on the other hand consist of static parts (like menus or titles or suchlike) and dynamic parts. The last posts on this website actually are a dynamic part. I put my texts online over a form and they are transformed and displayed on the website. I don't have to reprogram the website every time I add a new post - and I don't have to create the HTML-sites for each post on which they and the few comments can be seen even after they're no longer on this first site. I just put in the new post and the dynamic programming of Blogger does the rest. The same can be achieved by using PHP, I've already learned how to do a simple forum or a program for uploading files without an FTP-program (which you normally use for it).

So PHP seems to be very useful - and XML, too, which will be really covered in a few months. Now I only have to find out whether or not I can use PHP on my current webspace or not. It would really help me to get my quizzes up - with which I still do have a lot of problems (but more in the next post).


PHP, coupled with MySQL, might also be the solution for my main problem with "Geschichtenschmiede". Currently every new story I write means creating a new website. With PHP and MySQL I could feed the text to the database and simply add it to the site this way. But currently that's still dreaming. In the future? Who knows?


Finally we're getting somewhere in the web-master course. I could, theoretically, do a complete web-shop or regularly updating online comic (if I could draw, that is) with the knowledge I have already gotten - and will get in the future - about PHP.

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