Things you can do with php

What can PHP do?

Anything. PHP is mainly focused on server-side scripting, so you can do anything any other CGI program can do, such as collect form data, generate dynamic page content, or send and receive cookies. But PHP can do much more.

• Server-side scripting. This is the most traditional and main target field for PHP. You need three things to make this work: the PHP parser (CGI or server module), a web server and a web browser. You need to run the web server, with a connected PHP installation. You can access the PHP program output with a web browser, viewing the PHP page through the server. All these can run on your home machine if you are just experimenting with PHP programming. See the installation instructions section for more information.
• Command line scripting. You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks. See the section about Command line usage of PHP for more information.
• Writing desktop applications. PHP is probably not the very best language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if you know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs. You also have the ability to write cross-platform applications this way. PHP-GTK is an extension to PHP, not available in the main distribution. If you are interested in PHP-GTK, visit » its own website.

PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, macOS, RISC OS, and probably others. PHP also has support for most of the web servers today. This includes Apache, IIS, and many others. And this includes any web server that can utilize the FastCGI PHP binary, like lighttpd and nginx. PHP works as either a module, or as a CGI processor.

So with PHP, you have the freedom of choosing an operating system and a web server. Furthermore, you also have the choice of using procedural programming or object-oriented programming (OOP), or a mixture of them both.

With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. PHP’s abilities includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies (using libswf and Ming) generated on the fly. You can also output easily any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can autogenerate these files, and save them in the file system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic content.

One of the strongest and most significant features in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple using one of the database specific extensions (e.g., for mysql), or using an abstraction layer like PDO, or connect to any database supporting the Open Database Connection standard via the ODBC extension. Other databases may utilize cURL or sockets, like CouchDB.

PHP also has support for talking to other services using protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (on Windows) and countless others. You can also open raw network sockets and interact using any other protocol. PHP has support for the WDDX complex data exchange between virtually all Web programming languages. Talking about interconnection, PHP has support for instantiation of Java objects and using them transparently as PHP objects.

PHP has useful text processing features, which includes the Perl compatible regular expressions (PCRE), and many extensions and tools to parse and access XML documents. PHP standardizes all of the XML extensions on the solid base of libxml2, and extends the feature set adding SimpleXML, XMLReader and XMLWriter support.

And many other interesting extensions exist, which are categorized both alphabetically and by category. And there are additional PECL extensions that may or may not be documented within the PHP manual itself, like » XDebug.

As you can see this page is not enough to list all the features and benefits PHP can offer. Read on in the sections about installing PHP, and see the function reference part for explanation of the extensions mentioned here.

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6 Useful Things To Do With PHP

Angela Bradley is a web designer and programming expert with over 15 years of experience. An expert in iOS software design and development, she specializes in building technical hybrid platforms.

PHP is a server-side programming language that is used in conjunction with HTML to enhance the features of a website. So what can you do with PHP? Here are 10 fun and useful things you can use PHP for on your website.

Have a Member Log In

You can use PHP to create a special area of your website for members. You can allow users to register and then use the registration information to log in to your site. All of the users’ information is stored in a MySQL Database with encrypted passwords.

Create a Calendar

You can use PHP to find today’s date and then build a calendar for the month. You can also generate a calendar around a specified date. A calendar can be used as a standalone script or incorporated into other scripts where dates are important.

Last Visited

Tell users the last time they visited your website. PHP can do this by storing a cookie in the user’s browser. When they come back, you can read the cookie and remind them that the last time they visited was two weeks ago.

Redirect Users

Whether you want to redirect users from an old page on your site that no longer exists to a new page on your site, or you want to give them a shorter URL to remember, PHP can be used to redirect users. All of the redirection information is done server side, so it is smoother than redirecting with HTML.

Add a Poll

Use PHP to let your visitors take part in a poll. You can also use the GD Library with PHP to display the results of your poll visually instead of just listing the results in text.

Template Your Site

If you like to redesign the look of your site often or want to keep the content fresh on all the pages, then this is for you. By keeping all of the design code for your site in separate files, you can have your PHP files access the same design. This means when you make a change, you only need to update one file and all your pages change.

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PHP Tutorial

PHP is the most popular server-side scripting language for creating dynamic web pages.

PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a very popular and widely-used open source server-side scripting language to write dynamically generated web pages. PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It was initially known as Personal Home Page.

PHP scripts are executed on the server and the result is sent to the web browser as plain HTML. PHP can be integrated with the number of popular databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and so on. The current major version of PHP is 7. All of the code in this tutorial has been tested and validated against the most recent release of PHP 7.

PHP is very powerful language yet easy to learn and use. So bookmark this website and continued on.

Tip: Our PHP tutorial will help you to learn the fundamentals of the PHP scripting language, from the basic to advanced topics step-by-step. If you’re a beginner, start with the basics and gradually move forward by learning a little bit every day.

What You Can Do with PHP

There are lot more things you can do with PHP.

• You can generate pages and files dynamically.
• You can create, open, read, write and close files on the server.
• You can collect data from a web form such as user information, email, phone no, etc.
• You can send emails to the users of your website.
• You can send and receive cookies to track the visitor of your website.
• You can store, delete, and modify information in your database.
• You can restrict unauthorized access to your website.
• You can encrypt data for safe transmission over internet.

The list does not end here, there are many other interesting things that you can do with PHP. You will learn about all of them in detail in upcoming chapters.

Advantages of PHP over Other Languages

If you’re familiar with other server-side languages like ASP.NET or Java, you might be wondering what makes PHP so special. There are several advantages why one should choose PHP.

• Easy to learn: PHP is easy to learn and use. For beginner programmers who just started out in web development, PHP is often considered as the preferable choice of language to learn.
• Open source: PHP is an open-source project. It is developed and maintained by a worldwide community of developers who make its source code freely available to download and use.
• Portability: PHP runs on various platforms such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS, etc. and it is compatible with almost all servers used today such Apache, IIS, etc.
• Fast Performance: Scripts written in PHP usually execute or runs faster than those written in other scripting languages like ASP, Ruby, Python, Java, etc.
• Vast Community: Since PHP is supported by the worldwide community, finding help or documentation related to PHP online is extremely easy.

Tip: Do you know some huge websites like Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, and Wikipedia are built using PHP. Most of the major content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento are also built in PHP.

What This Tutorial Covers

This PHP tutorial series covers all the fundamental programming concepts, including data types, operators, creating and using variables, generating outputs, structuring your code to make decisions in your programs or to loop over the same block of code multiple times, creating and manipulating strings and arrays, defining and calling functions, and so on.

Once you’re comfortable with the basics, you’ll move on to next level that explains the concept file system, sessions and cookies, dates and times, as well as how to send email from your script, handling and validating forms, perform data filtration and handling errors in PHP.

Finally, you’ll explore some advanced concepts like classes and objects, parsing JSON data, pattern matching with regular expressions, exception handling as well as how to use PHP to manipulate data in MySQL database and create useful features like user login system, Ajax search, etc.

Tip: Every chapter in this tutorial contains lots of real-world examples that you can try and test using an online editor. These examples will help you to better understand the concept or topic. It also contains smart workarounds as well as useful tips and important notes.

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