Hey everyone, I think this is the most appropriate forum for this question. I understand that php mysql etc allow for large sites such as Facebook etc but what can php ajax mysql bring to a small website. I.e. for example a artists portfolio page or a similar site not needing ecommerce or user logins. Thanks for any replys as I'm a little confused

 

Plus every decent job in Leeds seem to want PHP programmers only!

I think PHP programming is a very useful and quite important skill to have. It's allows for great interactivity as you said, and from my experiences so far, it's been very helpful and handy to have. To answer your question on what it could do on a small site like an artist's portfolio, it could be used to build a small Content Management System (CMS) for the artist to keep a blog on what he has been doing. And as it's all built from PHP and MySQL, all the artist has to do is fill in a form on the admin page and it appears straight onto the site. Requires no HTML/PHP/MySQL programming whatsoever for the client. And that certainly helps for clients who aren't computer-literate.

Thanks for that reply, I've set my sights on learning php so its just good to get an insight into what it can do. Any other examples?

Eh, there's lots of examples really, but all leading to one thing really. It can be used to edit every single page if set up that way. PHP is every useful and it's becoming a neccessity in web designers' skills. That's mainly all I use it for, but I know it can be used for many different things.

Hi although there is no MySQL here this site (old and not used anymore) was designed by me with a PHP class for displaying pictures www.intunnel.co.uk/oldintunnel/slide.php. You could easily adapt it to do a nice slideshow for an artists site.

 

Rob

I think there are two main advantages of PHP. First, the fact that it can interact with databases and files. It can pull information from them, write information to them and let you edit the information in them. The possibilities that opens up are huge. It allows you to do things like make a CMS, have per-user settings and so on.

 

The second strength is the ability to define actions based on other variables, including external ones - time, date, contents of files or databases. Using if/else loops, you could have say, a site that changes look or content based on the time of day, the amount of times someone has logged in or the type of content they've been looking at.

 

Either of those alone are a huge step forward compared to XHTML, but things can get really interesting when you start using both together.. say, changing the content according to information that was pulled into the databse from another site. A simple example might be a site that gathers airline flight prices from other sites, and when they reach a certain level, the site alerts the user that there is a cheap flight to a location they've expressed an interest in.