Understanding PHP basics
Get PHP info
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
Let's write our first PHP code.
<?php
echo "Hello from PHP";
?>
Storing values in a variable
<?php
$myName = "Kooka";
$friendsName = "Loopa";
echo "<p>I am $myName and I have a friend called $friendsName.</p>";
?>
Display errors
Insert the following two lines at the top of your scripts to display errors.
error_reporting( E_ALL );
ini_set( "display_errors", 1);
HTML5 page with php
<?php
$title = "Test title";
$content = "<h1>Hello World</h1>";
$page = "
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>$title</title>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;charset=utf-8'/>
</head>
<body>
$content
</body>
</html>";
echo $page;
?>
If you view source on the above code you will only see the HTML code.
Template
Templates are library files that is reusable code. You can include templates in your code via 4 methods: include, include_once, require, and require_once.
In a template file you will have your HTML code two variable: $title, $content. The title variable will be in the title section and content variable will be in the body section of the HTML. Save this file in templates/page.php. You will call this file from your index page and also put content in the two variables.
template/page.php
<?php
$page=
"<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>$title</title>
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;charset=utf-8'/>
</head>
<body>
$content
</body>
</html>";
?>
Here is the index file that calls the template/page.
<?php
//complete code for index.php
$title = "Test title";
$content = "<h1>Hello World</h1>
<br>
<h3>Good year tires</h3>";
//indicate the relative path to the file to include
require "templates/page.php";
echo $page;
?>
Commenting your code
For one line comments you can use two front slashes // and for a block of code you can /* to at the beginning and end it with */. ==
