Where now?

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fried
Forum Newbie
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Sep 08, 2009 5:43 am

Where now?

Post by fried »

I am pretty much a complete newbie to PHP. I've spent an intensive month following O'reilly's PHP and MySQL guide, and understand the basic concepts and what blocks of code do, if not exactly individual lines of code.

The reason I started this project was because a friend who designs websites (graphics/ architecture) always needs someone to do the PHP programming. The PHP is used primarily for backoffice. I was discussing with him what he needs, he explained simply for an Administator to be able to change the home page image, change menu page images, add pages, add menu items etc easily, while there are many tutorials for creating passwords/ checking forms/etc etc, these are all written completely in PHP.

My friend works in actionscript, but always gives his PHP programmer an XML file to work from, this gives me a headache trying to conceptually understand the steps I need to go from when working with a website that already exists. The current project has one title page, and 5 submenus, everything is static.

So what I'm really looking for is some advice on my next steps. Most tutorials assume that you are buliding the whole site in PHP. How do we work on a project that involve other people languages? How do I work from an XML data file? In small projects like this do I really need to use databases?

Any advice, resoures, links would be much appreciated.
Also appreciate that my last programming language was Basic back in '83.
My friend would like me operational in 3 months!

Thanks in advance;
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superdezign
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Posts: 4135
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 11:06 pm

Re: Where now?

Post by superdezign »

So... you want to learn how to apply what you've learned in PHP?

For XML files, it all depends on the data you are receiving. XML is no more than a format for sending data. Databases tend to be more practical since they can be updated and they can be read properly while being updated. Changing an XML file live can cause problems with loading updated data. ActionScript can be used to communicate with the database, but this is typically done by using PHP with AS. For the most part, I have PHP send XML to AS, not the other way around.

Administration is normally what us PHP developers do when working on the projects of small businesses. They have a website but they don't know how to update it without breaking it. Our job is to make it dynamic and give them an interface to work with. Adding dynamic content to a static page is easy; building the interface can be challenging, depending on how user friendly you want it to be.

Adding dynamic content requires you to first allow PHP to parsed in a page. This can be done on any type of file via your server settings, but it's easier to just convert file to PHP format. Then, just add the content in.

Building an interface requires user validation, and a basic CRUD (Create Remove Update Delete) system. Some developers are lazy and just give the client one big text box to edit for each page. It's better to allow separate entries of content so that each entry can be dated and updated/removed in the future without accidentally ruining other data.

You're welcome to ask us questions along the way.
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