PHP...?

[robotsatemygma]

What the heck is PHP? I can't find a website that actually describes it in "Laymen" terms.

Anyone?

Oh and update so I don't bump an old thread... I got my iPod figured out. Shuffle was engaged on the lil drop down in the music player screen.

 

[Kagami]

PHP is a coding language for web stuff, you can put HTML directly into it which is nice...it's kind of a way to make web pages do things if you want to think about it that way. Like, this forum was written in PHP.

 

[sami]

Basically the most popular usage is webpage language/scripting...basically.

Try this. You write a page with html, you have a static page. You outline the background wallpaper, font color, etc, and it generates one static page.

With php, you can use it to generate pages dynamically. Ever heard of MySQL? That's a database. Just chunks of data just sitting, waiting to be called by PHP to be displayed in a webpage.

Dat make sense?

EDIT: one minute pwnt by LuckyStar-san

 

[rahul_mukerji]

Suppose you want an interactive website / forum. You want to log in and keep an account of people visiting and their passwords for logging. And say you want get a report on statistics of the forum / website usage every month.

Doing the above is difficult in straight html. You need something that can store all the info such as names/login id/passwords i.e. A Database.

You also need scripts that can read and update pages on the fly based on the users input (new thread) i.e Dynamic Page generation. Such can be accomplished by PHP (among other technologies).

PHP is an easy to learn scripting language that allows the admin to gain a lot of control over the pages being displayed and add a lot of features.

Here is a good starting point:PHP 101

 

[robotsatemygma]

Thanks guys.

 

[Scali]

If you know what JavaScript is... think of PHP as the server-side variation.
JavaScript allows you to put scripts into a webpage that runs inside the browser of the person viewing the page... PHP allows you to put scripts into a webpage that run when the server is sending the page to a browser.

A forum consists of pages almost entirely generated by PHP. All the posts and all the user profiles are stored in a database. When you view a thread, PHP will retrieve all the posts related to that thread from a database, combine it with the info of the people who posted them, and then generate a page with a specific layout, all on-the-fly.

Look at the bottom, where you see for example:
Page generated in 0.16627 seconds with 17 queries