How To Code Your First PHP Webpage?

A business is simply an idea which needs a proper implementation to make it successful. Ideas are all about making them happen in reality. Those who have a business idea in their mind, they first need a business website, which will serve as a platform for all kinds of business dealings. A website is a need of present time for any business. It is the basic requirement if you are planning to start a new business.

Earlier, websites were created through complex development procedures. But nowadays, some form of content management system also known as CMS is used to develop a website as it is available with tons of free options that power your website. Moreover, CMS like WordPress, Drupal, etc are easy to use and let you develop a simple website yourself without much assistance. Apart from CMS, there are different programming languages that are commonly used for website development. One among them is PHP – Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP is the commonly used open source general scripting language that is best suited for website development. There are several leading content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Prestashop and highly popular websites like Facebook, Flickr, MailChimp, Wikipedia, Baidu, Yahoo!, Tumblr, Fotolia, Digg, iStockPhoto and many more, these all are written in PHP. Learning PHP doesn’t require mastering skills. It just demands practice and patience. Once you understand PHP, the next step is learning how to write code for a simple PHP web page.

In order to write PHP scripts, you need access to a web server running PHP. You have two main options:

Running PHP On Your Computer: The best way to run PHP is installing complete XAMPP package on your computer. This package comprises of the Apache Web server, MySQL database engine, and PHP. It is easy to install and available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Running PHP Scripts on Web Host: Those who have web hosting account that supports PHP, then it is easy to upload PHP scripts through FTP and run them on the web server. You don’t need to install anything to run your script, which is the biggest advantage of the web server. But the biggest disadvantage is that it is slower to write and test scripts.

Almost all PHP pages are executed on the server. When someone visits your PHP page through his/her web browser, the web server reads their PHP script. It then organizes an output to send to the web browser. This is the reason why PHP scripts typically comprise of database calls and business logic calculations. This is something that you wish to conceal from the general public. No one wants to show their database structure, as it can be easily hacked.

First PHP Script

 

write first PHP code

Most of the script is plain XHTML. The PHP code is inside the tags:

how to code first PHP webpage

 

The tags notify the Web server to consider everything inside the tags as PHP code that needs to be run. And everything outside these tags is sent directly to the browser as it is. This code of single line is very simple. It employs a built-in function, echo, to put some text on view “Hello, world!” in the Web page. There are several functions in PHP that can be used to mark feature-rich applications.

Apart from static text output, there are several other exciting features of PHP. In PHP, there are variables that store value within a PHP script and these are defined with dollar sign “$”. Therefore, “$number” can hold any value like 1 or 10. Given below is the code for adding two numbers. The output is displayed to the user.

 

PHP coding for beginners

 

In order to avoid writing the same code again and again, you can define a code in the form of functions. You can avoid writing same code at multiple locations. Given below is the example of a function that takes two numbers as input parameters and the output is the sum of two.

PHP code to add two numbers

After creating a few small codes, it can be said that PHP is a versatile and advanced scripting language that can easily handle basic to advanced web pages or web applications. You can easily create shopping carts, database driven web pages, and user authentication through PHP. Learning PHP can prove helpful for you as you can yourself build powerful websites for any business idea.

Those who don’t wish to learn PHP as they know they can’t really do, don’t worry as you have another option. Simply hire a PHP developer or a web development company that can provide you assistance in PHP development. They will either assign you a full-time PHP developer or create a complete team of PHP developers, depending on the complexity and size of the website.

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