PHP For Domainers: Lesson #1

So I was up late last night making some tweaks to my blog theme and realized that now would probably be a good time to share some of my PHP knowledge with new Domainers. PHP is an essential language to know when working with WordPress and comes-in handy for building your own sites as well. The great thing about PHP is that it is nowhere near as complicated as a programming language like C++ or Java so you can learn and begin using PHP very quickly.

So for the month of June I will be doing a four-part series on PHP that will get you up and running without having to read one of those “Learn PHP in 24-hour” books. I think PHP is an essential language for any Domainer that is also a developer. As more and more Domainers start blogging or developing mini-sites PHP will continue to become increasingly important. If you’ve ever been confused by the inner-working of your WordPress themes I hope this helps to allow you to customize your themes beyond the WordPress GUI.

So let’s get started with the first lesson!

Okay – so what is PHP? I’ll make this quick so we can get to the good stuff. PHP is a way to build interactive websites. It is considered a server-side language which means that the code you write will run on your web server rather than a web visitor’s computer (Javascript on the other-hand is a client-side language which runs on the web visitor’s computer). PHP allows you to breathe life into your websites by adding dynamic content – and with a blog this is very important!

You can add PHP to an existing website easily by simply typing when you want to start writing “<?PHP” before your code and then "?>" when you are done with your code. That’s it – put your PHP code between these two tags and you are ready to go. So time to learn your first PHP function – print. The code snipped below will write – “Hello Domaining World” on your site:

<?php
print “Hello Domaining World”;
?>

If you put this into an HTML document and upload it to your server (given that is supports PHP which just about every hosting company has pre-installed) then you’ve just written your first working PHP code! Pat yourself on the back and we’ll move-onto something a bit more interesting.

Let’s cut to the chase and make something interactive. Where PHP really shines is interacting with HMTL forms. Now I’ll show you how to make a simple form on your website that you can then interact with using PHP – first let’s start with a basic HTML form:

<form method = “POST” action = “domainvestors_form.php”>
Name: <input type = “text” name = “username”>
Domain: <input type = “text” name = “domain”>
<input type = “submit” value = “Submit”>
</form>