Hi all At current, I am able to do some HTML, CSS and with my knowledge last summer I made this website. I'd like to advance my knowledge now, and learn a programming language, ideally PHP. Assuming no previous programming knowledge, how quick do you think it would take to pick up PHP to an adequate level to turn the above static site, into a dynamic database driven one? I've got as many hours to put into learning a day as I need, as I'll be in the office. I can appreciate that it'll vary according to the person, but I'm a quick learner, with some web experience so I'm looking for a window of time. Thanks
Hi! I should suggest to use a CMS tool to make a DB driven web site faster and better. Of course you will need to know something of PHP, but if you are fast learner you will have results in a couple of months. Try Drupal. TYPO3 is the best choince in my humble opinion, but the learning curve is is VERY hard. I hope that helps jp
learning the basics of php is very easy there are online tutorials such as the one at w3schools .com. If you want to seriously learn php I would write my own pages from scratch to drill it in then use a cms to create what you really want later on when you've learned a little. The best start for you may be taking your site and creating pages for anything that is displayed multiple times and then just using include() to place the headers and whatnot wherever it needs to be and move on from there. Of course this is just my oppinion
Looking at the website you are speaking about, I think there is no need to make it dynamic unless the content will be really dynamic. Don't tax the server resources unnecessarily! Though you may use PHP for server side includes, etc!
Would make sense to make it dynamic for adding content and updating. It shouldn't take long to convert it to a database, but like you said, it's dependent on the student. Starting with the template setup for navigation etc would be logical for a beginner. Then move to the database part. Even going slow, it shouldn't take long.
Well there are a couple of ways to go about learning PHP and making your site dynamic. First up I like PHP and recommend every web developer knows it well enough to read other people's code and understand what is going on. First step, read the PHP manual and tutorials at http://us2.php.net/manual/en/index.php and also at W3C Schools here http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/DEfaULT.asP Then focus on some of the database specific stuff, such as MySQL. You can get some good info on that here http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.mysql.php None of this will give you a good grounding in logic and programming, so you might want to consider a beginners programming course at a local community college or something of that nature. I can't really recommend any good web sites for this type of training as I do not think it is something you can easily teach yourself. Hope this helps.
One thing that will be a pain in the neck - you had your pages ending in the .html extension. You will have to rewrite or redirect them or something so you don't lose their ranking or whatever. Your new site will have .php extensions by default, probably, unless you apply some sort of url rewriting. Too late now, anyway!
He can set HTML to be parsed as PHP. Would solve that problem. AddHandler php-script .php .php4 .php3 .html .htm In .htaccess should do the trick
Just add the following into your htaccess for everypage that has changed from html to php. (this will tell search engines that its apermanent move. redirect 301 /index.html http://www.yourpage.com/index.php be sure to leave it there forever though so that you don't lose any backlinks.