PHP Help!

[BZN Erik]

Hello. This is my first post in the forums , but anyways...
I'm planning to make my new website, Below Zero Network, out of PHP. I've heard there are PHP Databases, but I can't find any information on these databases. Anyone help me here?

Also, wheres a page that helps you with forms? I mean like, example: "staff.php?id_erik". The page, with the ID code or something at the end. Where do I learn how to do stuff like that? Thanks in advance


PS: If anyone wants to see a beta of my layout, its right here: http://below-zero.hypermart.net/bzn/

[freddydoesphp]

The tutorial on http://www.sitepoint.com should be a starting point!

[BZN Erik]

Does it have the stuff I asked for?
I'm terrible at looking for stuff on big sites

[PeterW]

This is "second hand" info, but I dont think hyper-mart have an SQL database.
More specifically, look under coding on webmasterbase.

[BZN Erik]

I'm not using hypermart, thats where I just put all my misc. stuff. My site is on the http://www.Trinium.com 's servers. They have php,mysql, all of it!
And I think I found a page on webmasterbase, but I'm trying to find the exact things I want

[freddydoesphp]

Yeah Hypermart doesn't even have PHP if you are planning on using PHP you best look for another host. I know they are free but that is why. There are no such thing as "PHP Databases" rather PHP interacts with Databases such as MySQL, Postgresql and Oracle to name a few. MySQL is free but of course you can't run it on your hypermart account.

[mad-onion]

Hi,

That page is looking impressive.

PHP and MySQL are the right combination to build dynamic websites (grin).

Start here http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php?aid=295 then go on to read the related articles section.

Some other useful sites are

http://www.php.net - the official PHP website.
http://www.mysql.com - the official MySQL website.
http://www.weberdev.com - a great site for PHP and related stuffs.
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP - lots of php stuff

There are others but those are a good start.

Oh and of course the SitePoint community is a great place to get advice.

[BZN Erik]

Well, where on sitepoint site's can I find a tutorial on how to begin PHP then? I can't find anything

[BZN Erik]

Hm... I'll cheak these out, some of them I've already been to. Thank you all
Hopfully I want have any more question for now

[mad-onion]

Try...

http://www.weberdev.com
http://www.phpbuilder.com
http://www.devshed.com

for beginners tutorials.

[Robo]

I suggest you go to the PHP section of devshed.com, then read the PHP 101, there's five parts, the tutorials are entertaining to read, and easy to follow.

After you get through the five parts, you'll have just about the basic skills you need to start using PHP.

Also in devshed.com, in the MySQL section, read the two parts about normalizing MySQL tables, again, easy to follow.

And http://www.webmonkey.com has some pretty good PHP tutorials as well under programming.

Aftter that, you can read some more "advanced" stuff at phpbuilder.com.

[freddydoesphp]

I hate to sound like an as and I will probablylose some karma for this. But if you can't even find the tutorial that Kevin Yank wrote on sitepoint.com then how the heck are you gonna learn PHP???

[BZN Erik]

I did find it... I just can't understand anything, hehe...

[BZN Erik]

I did find it... I just can't understand anything, hehe...
When your a young person like me, its hard!

[Son Nguyen]

How old are you? 4? Or else you should check out the General Chat to see how old are other guys here!

[mad-onion]

finder i know that ? wasnt directed at me but i think it is interesting all the same.

Im going to go start a new thread in General

"How old people were when they learnt programming" and related stuff.

[Kevin Yank]

My 10-part article series on SitePoint about building a Database-driven Web site using PHP is located here:

http://www.webmasterbase.com/article.php?aid=228&pid=0

It's the first thing that comes up if you type "database PHP" into the search box on SitePoint.com...

If you've already found this and are having trouble understanding things (this is what you seem to say above), please feel free to contact me directly with any questions you may have.

Of course, if you're trying to skip right to the sections that talk about what you want to do, I'm not surprised you don't understand anything. The article was written as a set of lessons, and each lesson relies on the knowledge you gained in the previous one. Read it from the beginning and I bet it'll make lots of sense!
<Edited by kyank on 12-16-2000 at 08:13 PM>

[mad-onion]

Kevin's article is very good, only wish i had known about it when i was learning PHP.

Actually it probably didnt exist when i was learning PHP, but you know what i mean!.

[BZN Erik]

Ok, thank you all for the help. I've learned some things now.

Happy Holidays!

[npoole]

It seems you're quite new at the technology, and before you can really start programming, you really do need to know the basics of programming itself, and not just PHP (or MySQL). The URL id's your speak of (form.php?ID=3) are generated mostly through database results. That is, if you say to MySQL "find me all the content I have in my database table Content which has a contenttypeid of 5 (which perhaps you've made your "Content Reviews" directory. Your statement would be..

SELECT * FROM Content WHERE ContentTypeID = 6

That would generate say, for example 10 results. So what do you do with those for your user? Your print out all the results in a link, so they can choose what they want. (Stay with me, this _should_ make sense)

So you have to do a loop of some kind to print out all the information. Each table in MySQL would have an ID number. So, I would use a while loop...

echo "Here are your results for content"

while ($myrow = mysql_fetch_row($string_of_query)) {

echo "<A HREF=\"link.php?ArticleID=$myrow[0]\">Article</A>";

}

and then link.php's first line would be...

if (!$ArticleID) {

echo "No Article ID!";

} else {

(do a database lookup where the ArticleID = $ArticleID)
SELECT * FROM Content WHERE ArticleID = $ArticleID

}

and then you print out the information.

You can also set static variables (which I use seldomly, but sometimes you need to).

Perhaps I wanted to show that you came to my article from the mainpage. So, I'll say "1" means yes, and "0" means no.

if ($MainPageLink == "1") {

echo "i see you came from the mainpage";

} else {

echo "Where did you come from?";

}

I hope this board doesn't mess this up too bad. If you want the code, email me at nathan@sitepoint.com and I'll email it to you.

Cheers,

Nathan