Posted by Nooze Goy on 07/26/07 21:42

KC wrote:
> Thanks for all comments! In the excel world I use both my own VBA
> code and borrowed stuff. and think I'll turn to my books to learn some
> basics first and trawl through the archive of this group to pick stuff
> up and try to make sense as I go along. I'm sure I'll have to ask
> when I get stuck so look forward to your future responses. Many
> thanks for the input so far.
>
> Regards
>
> KC
>

I have always found it extremely useful to work with "real" code, as
opposed to samples. Just as you discovered with VB, you'll see tons of
"real" PHP code around. Even better, there are any number of actual
working applications for which the PHP code is easily available.

It's a lot easier to work with an application that one understands, and
I think you might find it useful to take a look at WordPress. It's an
open source blog software with quite a sizeable user base, which
stretches across a large spectrum of people whose programming expertise
ranges from zero to high-octane.

WP's code is mostly PHP, with some javascript thrown in, and it uses
MySQL for its database management. Setup is negligible: create an empty
database in your MySQL server, download the WP code, install it in a
subdir off your website, and go to your browser and navigate to that
subdir... and away you go. The main site (wordpress.org) has a well-laid
out plan with plenty of user doc and lots of "themes" and plugins with
still more code. Even better, one of the themes is a purely skeletonized
one, so you can easily work with it and get immediate feedback. IIRC,
it's called "default-empty".

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