Page 1 of 1
New to PHP but not to programming - tutorial suggestions?
Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 4:21 pm
by banpro
I'm new to PHP but not to programming in general. I'm working on a project that I believe PHP is the best choice for part of it, and I'm hoping you all can help me with a few good tutorial suggestions given what I'm trying to accomplish.
I need to take user's form information from a web page and build a "profile" page for that user on the site which will be titled and saved as
http://www.domain.com/User_Name.htm. There's just 5 fields of data in the form, name, website/homepage, email and 2 textbox fields.
I'm sort of up against a time constraint on the project so going "ground up" with php.net's docs is out of the question, though I'll be doing that soon on my own as I like what I've seen of PHP's capabilities. But for this project, I hope there are a few suggestions you can provide on brief tutorials that deal in this type of page building to get me by.
Thanks in advance,
Scott
Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 6:15 pm
by McGruff
If you already have programming experience, it's just a question of learning the vocabulary, ie the names and behaviours of php functions.
I don't mean this to be an RTM post but I'd recommend getting the downloadable php manual (the one with user comments) if you don't already have it. That's the best source for finding out about the php functions and maybe all you will need if you already have a good knowledge about program design, databases and stuff.
Lots of php tutorials can be found in links from zend.com, php.net and this site.
Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 6:47 pm
by mrvanjohnson
This is fairly easy to do. You say
need to take user's form information from a web page and build a "profile" page
Is the information really on a webpage or a database?
In either event it can be done in PHP. Either grab it out of a database or if it's a static webpage already you can do what’s called preg_match. It would get ugly but should get the job done.
And what’s with the naming convention? Does it have to be
http://www.domain.com/User_Name.htm or can it be something like
http://www.domain.com?user=something ?
I totally agree with McGruff, download the manual from PHP.net (w/ user comments) If you have zero programming experience and you don’t want to start from the beginning it’s going to be hard to help you. If you really want to just dive it I would highly recommend buying a book for reference, you’ll need it.
Here are the tutorials that get me by
http://www.ascenvia.net/engine/
Good luck.
Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 8:29 pm
by banpro
Thanks for the suggestions. I had assumed using a combo of touch() and fwrite() to turn the data from the html form fields into a static html page would be the best option since the goal here is to allow the few dozen members of this group I'm doing the project for to be able to create viewable "profile pages"?
I'd actually originally written a small piece of software which allows for the same type of page creation and ftp'ing onto the server by the members, but the drawback there of-course is that they must first download the software to run it... that's why I'm hoping (since the demands for the script are so low) I can create something with PHP that will be web-based and produce the same results for them.
My rush is that they're launching the site on Thursday (in 2 days), so my PHP learning time is very limited for this project, that's why I was hoping there might be a tutorial floating around which details taking form data and creating a html page from it.
Thanks again,
Scott
Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2003 1:01 am
by banpro
Okay, it's 2 am here but I wanted to say thanks again for the suggestions. I have managed to get the script up and running, so now with a few hours of tweaking (tomorrow) the produced html pages' layout it'll be good to go.
Thanks again,
Scott