Introduction
I am starting to make a series of articles on PHP 7.0. This is the latest release, and today I will give you a brief description about PHP for beginners. I will start with the history of PHP and move further with some more features with some different methods.
What You Need To Follow This Article
- No previous experience of PHP programming.
- Good knowledge of HTML.
- Knowledge of JavaScript is helpful, but not essential.
What You Need
- Remote Server
- Local testing environments
Why Local Server
- No need to constantly upload scripts for testing.
- Don’t expose your mistakes in public.
What You Need For Coding
- Script Editor
- PHP Syntax Checking
- PHP Syntax Coloring
- PHP Code Hints
- Line Numbering
- A “Balance Braces”feature
Operating System
- PHP is platform neutral.
- It runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.
PHP Version
- This article is based on PHP 7.0
- PHP 6 never publicly released
- Recommended minimum PHP version PHP 5.5
- Official support for PHP 5.4 ended in September 2015
- Most code in this article will run on PHP 5.4
Revised
- Original version was based on PHP 5.3.
- Updated to PHP 7.
- Backward compatible with PHP 5.4 or later.
- No coverage of installing a local PHP server.
Improvements
- Removed discussion of “magic quotes”.
- Simpler array syntax.
- Clearer explanations.
- New chapter on interpreting error messages.
- Challenges and situation.
What PHP Can Do
- Process and email contact forms.
- Upload files from online forms.
- Generate thumbnails from larger images.
- Watermark images.
- Read and write files.
- Do date and time calculations.
- Change content depending on date or time.
- Communicate with database.
- And much, much more.
How PHP Works
![PHP]()
Common features in most PHP scripts:
- Variables
- Array
- Loops
- Conditional function
- Function
Using PHP
- Using file extension .PHP
Tags PHP
- Opening tag : <?PHP
- Don’t use <? as the opening tag
- Closing tag is optional
Using PHP
- Storage pages inside the server root folder names:
- Htdocs
- www
- wwwroot
- public-html
Viewing PHP Files Locally
- Don’t double click local files to view form.
- Make sure your local web server is running.
- Always view the page using a URL.
Read more articles on PHP: