Everything You Need To Know About PHP

What is PHP?

PHP stands for Personal Home Pages. The name is a slight anachronism, that harks back to it's earlier days, where it offered just that, a way to offer more personal web pages to your visitors. That is, a method to display information other than just boring HTML pages.

PHP works by being mixed into any standard web pages and offers much greater functionality and options. If a user requests this page, the server interprets this special PHP code, does what the code instructs, and presents the page as a final document to the user. All of this is totally seamless to the visitor. It is what goes on behind the scenes that is the important thing, and often there is more complexity there than meets the eye.

Today PHP allows literally hundreds of thousands of web pages to offer more than just pages that don't change, and to allow your business to update information on its website more easily. It is one of the most used programming languages on the Internet, and the possibilities are truly endless. If you see a web page that ends in .php (and occasionally more than just this) - you are seeing PHP at work.

What is a web programming language?

A web programming language allows dynamic pages to be served to a visitor to your website, rathen than just plain static pages.

A static page is simply a plain page, a page that does not change. It is visible, still can look great, is put somewhere on the Internet, and has to be changed manually every time a change is made. This can be time consuming when your site contains tens of, even thousands of pages and require updates regularly. HTML only offers this facility.

A dynamic page is a page which can do everything a static page can do, but also change to suit conditions, or present information from somewhere else that is also changing. PHP offers the facility to present these dynamic pages to your visitors. You are not always getting the same thing every time.

What happens if you wish to add a link to your latest wizz-bang product on every page? What happens if you wish to protect some of these pages from other people? What happens if you wish to update the content of the website without complex programming knowledge yourself? What happens if you want to add your clients into a database, and have this information presented to select users? All of these things can be handled more efficiently with a web programming language.

PHP is a comprehensive web programming language that can be used to overcome these limitations with static HTML pages, and essentially, offer more for your business.

What are the advantages of PHP?

There are several other web programming languages out there, including Microsoft .NET (or ASP), Coldfusion, Java, and many others, that you may have heard thrown around previously. After being presented with these other solutions, you now may be asking - So why PHP?

While it is true that many of these can do the same types of thing, PHP has several advantages. Here are some of the main ones as Oxygen Internet sees it:

• Cheaper hosting and more available servers - As PHP has risen to be one of the most popular language out there, there are a large number of companies that can host a PHP driven site. Of course, whilst Oxygen Internet offers our own range of competitive web hosting packages, it also means you have a massive range of other hosting to choose from if you do decide to ever transfer your website somewhere else.



• FREE to use, and cheaper ongoing costs - As many of the other languages out there are a bit more specialised, it can cost a lot more to develop a site using their technology. PHP is totally free of restriction to be used in whatever way you feel the need. No expensive or ongoing licensing fees, no expensive servers, and no expensive techical staff to keep your system reliable.



• Reliability and Performance - From our experience, PHP is able to offer pages that load a lot faster than many other dynamic languages on a similar server. Some programming languages offer a lot, but when the load on the server is great (i.e. you have many visitors accessing your website), things can start to slow down, or not display properly. At worse, the whole server itself can crash - leading to a dreaded 'this site cannot be displayed' until the problem is fixed. This can be disasterous to the public perception of your company and a mission critical web site.

What can it do for me?

Whilst you can probably see many of the benefits by reading the above, you may be thinking: "so how can can it expand my website?" The possibilities are quite large, and almost as large as your imagination (and budget!) allows, but here are a few possible features of your website which may require PHP programming:

• Content Management
• Booking Systems
• Real Estate listings
• Customer Databases
• Contact Managers
• Latest news and information
• Job Tracking Systems
• Ecommerce Solutions
• Email Forms
• User and password protected areas

For some further details on more specific details of applications we can build using PHP, please visit our Web Application Services page.

MySQL and PHP

Here at Oxygen Internet, most of our websites utilise a MySQL back-end database, in conjunction with PHP programming. A database driven web site allows you to store and retrieve information from your web site quickly and easily anywhere.

MySQL is a database built largely for the needs of the Internet, and in conjunction with PHP is a powerful combination. Whilst we mainly work with MySQL, Oxygen Internet is also able to utilise other database back-ends if required for your database driven website solution.

Pre-Scripted PHP Packages - Cheap, but for how long?

Increasingly, Oxygen is finding businesses that have stated they have had bad experiences with "PHP" in the past. Often less scrupulous website designers will be able to say "sure we can build you a PHP website", and charge a heavy price, but often they are merely rolling out a series of free and open-source packages. These, anybody can download for free.

They basically click install, change a few parameters and much of the basic facilities are already there for many common needs. In many instances this can work well for your business if implemented correctly, so we are not against this per-say. However, when problems occur, or you reach the stage where the system requires customisation, or changes to suit your business - that the (often expensive!) nightmares occur.

With an "out of the box" type mentality with these predefined scripts, anybody can install them, but it takes a good technical background, and established PHP programming knowledge, real php programming knowledge to be able to often make some of these changes, or to develop a totally custom solution if these packages are failing your needs.

This is where Oxygen Internet can help.