PHP for Web Pages

I have been programming with PHP for many years. As a language PHP has improved and changed dramatically as it has evolved into what is today. PHP stands for ‘PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor’.

I started out in web development with HTML. I learned standards compliant HTML, but with HTML came a need to load information dynamically on page load. I was interested in PHP because I had heard it was similar to the C programming language.

I didn’t find PHP to be so similar to C, but it was excellent for generating HTML dynamically. Something as simple as putting the current year in the footer is easy with PHP. If an entire page needs to be generated based on different criteria PHP is also ideal for that.

Once PHP gave me the power to pull in data to a page APIs and so many other possibilities came into play.

Your web or mobile application will need to be backed with databases, APIs, email functionality and more. PHP, MySQL, JSON, SqLite Curl and Web Sockets are just a few of the technologies I can leverage to bring your app to life.

PHP for Web Applications

As I continued to learn PHP I began to see the bigger picture. PHP was not only ideal for generating a single webpage, but it was the perfect tool to create complex web applications.

Now instead of only a single webpage being generated and entire website could exist as content in a database. PHP allows that data to be created, updated and display using HTML5, Javascript and CSS user interfaces. For example, WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) built using PHP.

I didn’t write the core code of the WordPress CMS, but I do create custom WordPress themes, custom plugins, frameworks, customer portals, shopping carts and much more all using PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

One of the nicest things about PHP is it’s flexibility. It can be used for sequential, functional and object oriented programming, individually or all at once. This is a benefit, but it can also be a drawback.

With too much freedom programmers may just create scattered code that can be very difficult for another programmer to work with. Large teams of programmers often run into this problem.

I try to avoid cowboy coding by using best practices and accepted standards in all my programming.