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Posted by AF on 08/10/05 17:31
On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 10:21:20 +1000, dorayme <dorayme@optusnet.com.au>
wrote:
snip
>
>You seem nice and maybe won't bite my delicate head off. Would you offer or
>remind me of your path to learning this? Online refs are best but maybe a
>book?
>
>dorayme
>
Trial and error wa show I did it.
Here is a general rule I have figured out about php:
If you find yourself doing the same thing, time after time, inside of
a web page, or on many pages, there is probably a way to eliminate
this with php.
So I started learning php as a means to publish more pages with less
effort.
So I would take a simple task that I was doing many times within a
page or doing many times on many pages, and I would find a way to do
it better with php.
The first problem that I attacked with this was keyword lists,
descriptions, and titles. The way to make me more productive and
spend less time typing keywords, descriptions, and titles was to
figure out a way to get php to fill in variables for me.
This involved setting up variables and populating variables and the
echo command. I played around with this for several weeks until I was
able to use variables and the echo command to help eliminate as much
typing as possible. Just a small improvement, but it saved me time.
Then I wondered could I save time in other ways. The biggest
revelation came when I realized many of my web pages could be broken
into several parts:
cosmetics without regard to content
navigation links
content
headers and footers, if I want these to change based on the page
content.
So I posted to the php newsgroup, alt.comp.lang.php, (which by the way
is a great source of information, just like this one), and people
pointed me to the include command in php.
With the include and the echo commands and variable assignment, you
can accomplish quite a bit.
Finally the last thing I learned quickly was url parsing, or how to
strip info from a url. I do it using the "/". Other people do it
using variable assignment in the url.
There are some excellent references to this in the php manual, and it
is easy to learn.
I won't go into all of this here. I found the trial and error method,
using the php manual, online resources, and the newsgroup for php
worked well for me. And I have only scratched the surface of php.
Hope this helps. If you decide to start learning php, post questions
and sample code at the newsgroup,alt.comp.lang.php, and you will
usually get quick responses.
By the way, it helps when using php, which is programmatic generation
of pages, to use css. Css makes it very easy to format pages. The
reason css and php are almost necessary companions is that with css
you eliminate a lot of formatting commands, like setting fonts in your
html, and thus if you are using php as I do, i.e. mainly as a means of
publishing lots of pages with as little typing as possible, css is a
great companion.
Best regards,
Al
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