PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
PHP is supported on all our packages so you can start using it immediately.
PHP started out life as a set of Perl scripts named 'Personal Home Page Tools', created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995. These created to help track access to his online resume.
Eventually, as the functionality requirements of these scripts grew, a much larger implementation was written by Rasmus as a replacement for the Perl scripts.
This enabled database connectivity and allowed for the creation of dynamic website content.
This code, called PHP/FI (Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter), was evenually released for everybody to see, use and improve.
PHP/FI was eventually released in 1997 and was quickly succeeded by the first alpha of PHP 3. By 1998 a complete rewrite of the PHP core was released and named PHP4 and today is used by millions of websites
and hundreds of thousands of developers. In fact, it is reported that PHP is in use by over 20% of all websites on the Internet.
A very simple PHP script
Create a file named "hello_world.php" with the content shown below and upload it to your hosting account. You do not need to set special permissions as you do with perl, the only requirement is that you name the pages with the .php extension.
<html>
<head>
<title>PHP Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo '<p>Hello World</p>'; ?>
</body>
</html>
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This is a very simple script which uses the echo statement in PHP to display the words Hello World. As PHP is an embedded scripting language
you will notice that it sits comfortably with normal HTML. Simply write the code and upload to your hosting space. In fact, all PHP code should be embraced with the opening and closing PHP tags like so (comments start with two forward slashes //):
<html>
<head>
<title>PHP Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php // Opening PHP TAG
/*
Display the browser
being used by
the site visitor
*/
echo $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
// Closing PHP TAG
?>
</body>
</html>
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If you already have an Interhost hosting account, you can test these examples out right now.
Online References
You can get further information on the PHP website http://www.php.net
You can also view the complete reference manual here
Many people get started with PHP and MySQL with the Webmonkey tutorial here
If any of the above links are not working please let us know.
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