When would a Web Developer use PHP?



Early websites were initially developed solely using Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). What this meant is that all the content for a website resided on the HTML pages themselves. So for example if your company sold a thousand different products you would need one Web page for each product or a thousand different HTML product pages.

The major problem with this way of building Web sites is that the design and the content reside in the same place. So for example if you wanted to update all the product prices, you would manually need to open all thousand product pages, change the prices, save and re-upload.

Not only was this very time consuming but allowing non-Web designers access to the HTML could potentially have very serious consequences for your Web site, particularly if the HTML code was tampered with in any way.

The solution to this problem was to create a database driven website where all the content resided in an external database. You would therefore only need to create one product page and depending which parameter was passed to the database, the website would display only the relevant product/s.

Obviously this creates a much more controlled environment and a simple task like change product prices could be achieve in seconds.

As HTML is a static language, it can't really talk to a database and that's where PHP comes in. Web developers use PHP to pass instructions to and from the database. So for example if someone was searching for a blue widget product, PHP would tell the database to search for any product that contained the word Blue Widget in its name and then to display the matches in a particular page. If the user then click on one of the matched provided to view the product detail page, once again PHP was instruct the database to load that particular products details in the product detail page.

There are many other benefits of using databases include accumulating information from your users via HTML form submission, login authentication for customer logins, e-commerce, managing large volumes of data and much more.

PHP is sometimes referred to as a server-side language, which basically implies that it can do some processing on the web server prior to returning any results.

MySQL is an open source database which is commonly used by PHP developers. PHP and MySQL are a powerful team of tools for any Web Developer.

Other popular databases are Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL database.

Another benefit of using PHP and MySQL is that most Web hosting companies won't charge you extra to host a Web site which uses PHP and a MySQL database.