Where to start in the development process

Rakuli your tutorial is definitely helpful in understanding php. I am wanting to develop an e-commerce site selling futon covers similar to this site: Just Futon Covers but they use php which I am totally in the dark with.

I really just dont understand where to start in the development process. Is it worth my time to learn how to use php first or just use traditional design methods?

Basically, I want my final product to sort of mimic this site: Atlantic Dominion Solutions, but once again they use php. I have a pretty good understanding of regular old html.

Also, what is the real benefit of using php over xhtml or html?

The benefit is that it produces dynamic content,
very easy to modify parts of the site,
databasing,
logins,
sessions,
and a lot more!

There are Free e-commerce out there

__________________
The Net is Dying | Vanilla Source - Vanilla Help, and mods

So php is makes the website much more dynamic and involved on the client side?

That's quite a good explanation I guess!
Examples of things you can do:

• User logins
• Send emails (contact forms etc)
• Different stylesheets
• Put in customer info into a database and take it out, edit it etc.
• Use includes, which means updating a navigation is just editing one file.
• functions: you can perform a certain action over and over with just one line of code.

Some more things, that's just to get the jist of what you can do!

Hi Jeremy,

It's nice to hear that my tutorial has sparked your interest in PHP and I could go on for pages and pages about its benefits but will try to narrow it dow to some key benefits.

Alex has pointed out some great specific possibilities with PHP but the 'ideas' for why to use it are just as important.

One thing to keep in mind is that PHP itself won't make your pages more dynamic than they are currently. PHP won't give you drop-down boxes or sliding menus but PHP gives you the tools to maintain 'state'. The ability to remember a user from page to page, to store user preferences in a database and call them out when needed, the ability to make pages viewable only be certain users (say after they have logged in).

One of the key features of PHP is the ability to embed it right in the middle of your pages. You can have XHTML page and put some PHP tags nested in to add some personalisation.

eg

PHP: Select all

<div>

<?php /*This is php in the middle of HTML*/ echo 'Hello',  $username, '!'; ?>

<!-- Right back into the HTML now //-->

</div>

Templating is another great reason to use PHP. If you plan to have a site with many products then it would be tedious to create a page for every product. With PHP you can create templates that output HTML with the product details dynamically added (from a database).

Not only does this make sense in having consitent display of data, you only have to update one file when making changes.

In addition to PHP's great support for databases (specifically, the dream marriage with mySQL) it can manipulate files, send emails, create and edit images and PDF's. PHP is a scripting language that is commonly used to create HTML but it can output XML for RSS feeds, it can output Javascript and create log files and so much more .

In other words, if you plan to create an online shop or ecommerce site then you would crazy to bypass a server side scripting language. I reccomend PHP because it has a very shallow learning curve, it's free and very flexible.

I hope that helps, feel free to ask more questions though, I'm happy to assist.

Cheers,