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, a content management system (CMS) is often used to develop a website, with many free options available to power your site. Moreover, a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal is 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 of them is PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP is a commonly used open-source general-purpose scripting language well suited to web 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 advanced 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 to install the complete XAMPP package on your computer. This package comprises the Apache web server, MySQL database engine, and PHP., 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: If you have a web hosting account that supports PHP, 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 expose their database structure, as it makes the site easier to hack.
First PHP Script
Most of the script is plain HTML. The PHP code is inside the tags:
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 single line of code is very simple. It uses the built-in echo construct to display the text “Hello, world!” on the web page. PHP has many functions that can be used to make feature-rich applications.
Apart from static text output, there are several other exciting features of PHP. In PHP, variables store values within a script and are defined with a dollar sign ($). For example, $number can hold any value, such as 1 or 10. Below is the code for adding two numbers. The output is displayed to the user.
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.
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.
