and these

Because the database has to be secured from all users (cos, it is possible to connect to a database from elsewhere, which we dont want) we will be creating a user account, i.e. username and password.

The database will expect anyone connecting to it to supply a username and password so we will be creating one, By default MySQL has a user called root. this user has al previleges and all we need to do is create a password for this user

Since this is for development only, will not give my DB a tough password, "pass" should do

Thats it, go to the system tray and start apache, sure php should start with it

Now, we will be faced with one process that could slow down our work, and that is opening folder and sub-folders until we get to the apache htdocs folder

I hate this and i am sure you will too, over time
so here is a trick

create a desktop shortcut, so that way, when i double click the shortcut, it opens that folder for me and from there, it becomes fun.

to create the shortcut, right click on an empty area on your desktop, select "new", "shortcut" fill the form and we are ready start coding

but first, we need to tell apache to treat index.php files the same way it does treat index.html

that will be for tommorrow

Install WAMP or XAMPP which will be much more easier

Thanks sir, i personally use wamp, but it will be better to let people know how they all work first

I am doing this because i found out that most people here on Nairaland whom we address as programmers dont even know they can indeed write their own applications without help from 3rd party scripts (not in all cases though)

the hidden goal of this tutorial is to build a real web application developer
and if you dont mind, let me continue

These procedures are they the same for all versions of Apache, PHP nad mysql?

I've started a tread similar to these

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-193865.0.html#msg3086749

Am planning to join with you just in case may help is need or I should continue with mine

Fellow Nairalander & @ poster what is your opinion.

@quadrillo,

I strongly suggest that you still continue with your thread separately, so that at the end of the day, it will be like nairalanders are having 2 different "classrooms" that complement each other. If I dont get a particular explanation right in one thread, I can go the other thread and get it sorted out.

I'm happy about your attitude to help without being paid. May God bless you and webdezzi

@webdezzi,

May I ask that you try as much as possible to make out time for us , "your students", out of your busy schedules. I sense it seems the enthusiasm is waning.

I am working on a project and also moving my files around as i just got a new laptop, thats why, I will still make time out. and thank Quad, you can contribute

@webdezzi
When will the holidays be over?
when are we going back to PHP class?
or have you decided to take us only half way?

Your were good though,

I am trapped in a BRT hold up, since i can't do much work, i think I will be able to move on from where we stopped


lets see what you must have before you proceed with us
Apache installed
php installed
mysql installed
and a file inside our Program Files > Apache Software Foundation > Apache2.2 > htdocs > tutorial folder named index.html

Now we need to rename index.html file to index.php because we want to test to see if php has been configured correctly

after renaming it, go to the address bar and type http://localhost/tutorial
hit enter and you should see something that looks like the image below


That is a list of what we have in the tutorial folder and thats because Apache can not find an index file
so we need to inform apache about a new tenant that just moved in -PHP (at least he deserves the same right as html)

every time apache starts, it reads the content of a configuration file to know how he is supposed to behave
so we will just open that file and edit it.

Next, we will be editing the apache config file and that will be tommorrow.
Good night.

(Dont forget that we are still going to test to see if php has been configured correctly)

I will use this part to try to expose how your mind should work when programming your way to being a grand master (i will assume, i am new to apache)

I will navigate to the apache folder, Why?

Because apache is the one serving our pages and we need to tell him to serve index.php whenever a user request for a directory like http://localhost/tutorial

so i navigate to Program Files > Apache Software Foundation >Apache2.2

so am lost, where do i go from here, i see the following folders: bin, cgi-bin, conf (wait, something tells me, conf is short for configuration, let me open that first)

i opened the folder up, but the files in it has funny names and looked like files not meant to be edited, but there is a file that says httpd.txt (image 1 below)
maybe that's it, let me have a look.

yes! thats it. but how do i know what and what to change

Lets use logic here, since apache is already serving index.html files as the default file, i can guess that this httpd.txt file contains the word index.html, so if i can find index.html, then i have hit it

it is my style to use the "find" in image 2 below (i will let the computer do the search, while i just look)

good, i found an index.html in image 3 below, (i know your mind should be telling you to replace it with index.php, but is it not possible to append index.php to index.html so that .html can still be served if .php is absent)

but how do i append it, is it a comma, or space or on a new line

let me google for this text that surrounds the index.html, someone must have asked such question on a forum elsewhere and probably gotten answers

<ifmodule dir_module> directoryindex (dont worry, google is not case sentitive)

now i found many results, and from the first 5, i can see that it has to be space, so i just add index.php like we have in image 4 below
save it and restart my apache

COOL! it works, it appears, apache now serves index.php as my directory index file
so we can see our first website

now create a test.php file and save it inside the tutorial folder with this little code in it

<?php echo "PHP is working";?>

now go to http://localhost/tutorial/test.php
and you should see this

PHP is working (without those tags)

The <?php echo " ";?> part of the code helps to instruct php on what to do.
if you see the code the same way you typed it in, then check the code again or copy and paste this directly from here

else

you will need to start with your php installation again, as you probably missed something out

That will be all for today

Tomorrow, we will download phpmyadmin
phpmyadmin(short for php-mysql-administrator) is a tool built with php, created just for managing mysql database and has won several awards online,

it allows you to do almost anything with mysql without having to read the mysql manual
and we will download it and put it in our web server folder, so we will access it from here

http://localhost/phpmyadmin

I am sure by now, you must have google for the phpmyadmin tool and downloaded it (thats if you are curious)

If not, Then go to http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=phpmyadmin&filename=phpMyAdmin-3.0.1.1-english.zip&use_mirror=dfn

thats the link.

download that file and unzip it into the htdocs folder, It comes with a weird folder name  like phpMyAdmin-3.0.1.1-english

just rename the folder to phpmyadmin (for convenience, so we don't need to bother about the version) and make sure it is in the htdocs folder
so go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin

you will run into a small problem on that page

on my page, it says phpmyadmin error
can not load mysql extension please check your php configuration -documentation


thats ok, we are getting that error because we did not install the mysql extension

An extension is a small program that depends on a main program to function
the main program can function alone without the extension, but the presence of the extension gives the program more power

we can say, we need a mysql extension for our installed php, this way, php can communicate with mysql better.

look at yourself as the main program and your computer as an extension, the computer gives you more power to connect to the rest of the world
you can function without the computer, but the computer can not function without you
so when next you need to connect to my tutorial, you need your computer

when next you need to connect to mysql database, you need a mysql extension

For an extension problem like this, i will go to google and search for

"phpmyadmin error
can not load mysql extension please check your php configuration"

this is a challenge for you, try to figure things out yourself, by using google as a place to go for help
while trying to solve this problem, you will end up learning some tips and tricks you probably wouldn't have known.
if at the end, you still can't get phpmyadmin to work, then come here and post the problem so we solve it together.

for now, let us proceed.

now, we will be looking at other ways we can setup a HTTP server, PHP, Mysql without going through all these boring steps.

situations may arise when you may need to move you project from one computer to another,certainly, we dont want to go through all the pain.

Now thanks to some good guys out there who have spared some of their precious time to write a single program that will install all these 3 guys for u, with just a few clicks.

examples of such software includes wamp-stands for windows Apache Mysql and PHP you can get it from here- http://www.wampserver.com/en/index.php (thats the english version)

XAMPP is another option if you are into perl programming, it works for php too

X means cross platform, Apache, Mysql, PHP and perl

there are loads of such softwares online but i prefer wampserver.

THIS IS FOR THOSE WHO WILL NOT LIKE TO GO THROUGH ALL THOSE HEADACHES(i mean, whats the point in breaking through a wall that has a door, lets use the door o jare)
so go get your wampserver installed and we move straight to business.

after the installation, you will end up with a folder "wamp" on your C drive
so your htdocs folder becomes www

so you will have to move the tutorial folder into this directory

C:\wamp\www

i expect you to uninstall all previous installations so you dont run into problems, although those installation can still live together with wamp, i will advice you uninstall them or stop their services from running.

please back up your project file first, i mean the tutorial folder
If you dont know how to uninstall a program, go to start> control panel>add or remove program(on vista, it is programs and features,(i hate microsoft for this)) >select apache, unistall it, mysql, unistall it, php, unistall it

restart your system, then install wampserver and restore your tutorial folder to the C:\wamp\www
and we are ready to go, 1 cool thing about wamp is that it also has phpmyadmin built in.

Now lets look at some basics of php programming

PHP stands for Hypertext Pre-Processor (just wondering why they did not call it hpp, anyway, the manual explains it)

what php does is process our script before spitting out the output. there is no way you will be able to view php codes in a web page's source
you will only see the result of the php code, which most times, are html, css, javascript

php is a server side language, it resides on the server, and stays there forever, you wont get to see the underlying code
html, css, javascript can well be call client side languages cos you can read them on your client side(the browser)

right click an empty area of a web page and view source (it may vary across browsers though)
that code you see is what your browser got from the server and does not contain any server side code.

any file ending with .php is passed over to the php engine for processing like we discussed earlier
and php on its end, looks inside the file and tries to parse it
php does not parse all the content of a file

it simply looks out for what belongs to him, parse it and leaves the rest

like this short php code

<?php echo "this is the first line";?>

<br/>
<?php echo "this is another line";?>

let us break this down

<?php - this informs php engine to get ready, this is the beginning of a php code

?> -informs php engine to stop processing the script. this is the end of a php script

so your code must begin and end with these 2 opener and closer

if you look above
<br/> belongs to the html family
so the php engine will not run that, it will leave it as it is

the last line will be run by the php engine
so the output to the browser will be

this is the first line
<br/>this is another line

notice that there is no space or new line in the output

It is now the job of your web browser to interprete the html part of the code i.e
<br/>

so what you get displayed in the brower will be

this is the first line

this is another line

while the source code will be

this is the first line
<br/>this is another line

now let us break this down
echo "this is the first line";

echo is a language construct in php, if you use that in your code, you are simply telling php to output whatever follow, so that the web browser can see it
notice the "" surrounding the output, it is a way of representing the type of text involved
for instance, this is a first line is of the type string - string is a series of character or text
other types includes

int meaning integer
Boolean meaning true or false, 1 or 0
float meaning decimals
arrays - this is more of name-value pairs stored together, e.g (lagos-fashola, nigeria-yaradua, keyboard-fingers, leg-shoes)

the ";" is what tells php, this is the end of a statement and you must include it at teh end of all your statements

Now lets see what we can do tomorrow

we will be getting into more depth on what all those syntax mean as we move on, if there is a syntax you dont understand, please let me know.

no trick here, all will be doing is creating a page that will insert record into our database(thats the admin area) and a page that will display the content.

first we need to build the database, to build the database we need to know what type of data we will be storing.

we will be storing the following
1. the news headline
2. the main story
3. the date the news was posted
4. Name of who submitted the news
5. an additional identifier, this must have a unique attribute(i will tell you why briefly)

lets say we want to delete a particular news, it will be bad practice to delete a news by its headline
as situations may arise (although rarely) when 2 or more news will have the same headline
so if we were to say "delete from database table where headline=naval strips woman on VI"
we may end up deleting other news that was added later with that same headline.

how do we beat this, we create a fresh column that will automatically assign a unique value to each new record.

Aaawww. . . . . absolutely stupendous guys - WELL DONE!

Pls lets try 2 keep the thread out there so that peeps can easily locate!

Is all these possible in VISTA

@ webdezzzi,

abeg big bros. . . . . how i go fit contact you for a one-on-one tete-a-tete

@Ruudie, Maybe next year on 08029037890

and yes. it's all the same windows, just a little beautification by microsoft

I have been away working on projects here and there, I also took the time to change the look of my website. I decided to put a temporary new look to my site

The real concept i had in mind is on its way,

Back to where we are, since we will be storing 5 different data everytime we post a news from the admin area, let us write an SQL for for that

SQL stands for Structured Query Language, This is the only language used by all database applications and this language is similar except for little difference across the different databases we have.
Mysql may differ from oracle a bit but they still use the same logical construct, something like select * from database.table where username="sledjama" and password= "mypass"

To write our SQL, i wont take you through the coding. We will use phpmyadmin which came with WAMP. this tool lets you see the underlying SQL
Note that phpmyadmin is not the database, it is a tool that interfaces with the database, you can also write sql queries using CLI (command line interface or better still in everyone's language, command promt). all phpmyadmin is doing for us is generate the sql based on our selections and giving it to mysql.

1. i made the database name tut99 (a little security here and there matters)

2. you can see the drop down showing on which database we are currently working on and the database name showing that we have zero number of tables
although phpmyadmin created the database for us, we can still see the query and that way, you learn the underlying sql if u want to
since we have no table, you can see phpmyadmin asking us to create one

3. I named my table m_new, at least thats a bit difficult to guess (another added security, my preference though)

4. Here we need to decide what we want and give it to phpmyadmin

first we have 5 fields, the first will be the ID we talked about and values inserted into this column has to be unique so we need to select unique,
because we don't want to startchecking if a value exist in that column all the time, we will add an auto_increment attribute to it. That way, the database will will automatically increment this column by 1 (if the last entry was 7, the next will automatically be set to 8 ) so we don't need to insert any value to this column, it will be done "miraculously"
the type has to be int, short for integer, and i named mine id, which is not a must, you can give it any name you like

second field will be holding all headlines, we will use varchar type which wont take character over 255,

third, the story may be as long as an epistle, lets use text for that, a text type will allow us insert almost unlimited number of character while allowing us to preview the first few line from phpmyadmin, note that we can also use blob-meant for binary data e.g picture, .exe software but preview may be difficult from phpmyadmin.

for the date, we will use DATETIME, this expects us to submit the date and time in this format "2008-12-16 03:50:34" anything other than that will force mysql to store 0000-00-00 00:00:00 instead


5. the person who posted the news, i will make it varchar (even if your name is longer that Mahershalahashbath, it will still make it into that column without being truncated)

if your selection is wrong, phpmyadmin will take you back for correction e.g adding auto increment to a column of type:varchar

this is the code i  got from create the table

 CREATE TABLE `tut99`.`m_news` (
`id` INT( 15 ) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`headlinex` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
`storyx` TEXT NOT NULL ,
`datex` DATETIME NOT NULL ,
`posterx` VARCHAR( 255 ) NULL
) ENGINE = InnoDB 

i can run this code from anywhere that allows me to connect to mysql

i can run it from my php script, CLI, phpmyadmin, python program, or name it

@webdezzi

Keep it up here man. I hope you're pals out here are learning and not just reading. You should ask them questions from time- to- time to make sure that they are catching up with the tutorials in here.

Cheers!

Thanks, I expect questions incases they are not getting any part of it.

nice one , i wish i could see some .NET geeks do same here men, because i am tryin 2 move on 2 it need some fundamental

jmslimx:

nice one , i wish i could see some .NET geeks do same here men, because i am tryin 2 move on 2 it need some fundamental

Try switch between here and the programmers section. Both ways, you'll get at what you want.

Cheers!

As a rule, i dont usually answer any question related to a different topic from what we are talking about, i double between programming and web designing, this will not be for instance a good place to start talking about .NET, the subject at hand is PHP/DHTML i think!

**************************Happy New Year***********************

to all, I must say i took my time to enjoy the just concluded holiday and had to forget this thread but not you guys.

Lets continue from where we stopped.

@webdeaai

Welcome back. I hope you really enjoyed yourself. How is the new year going to be like? You are welcome back and full time, back to work.

Continue your thread as you can see it is on top of the section now

Thanks Omni,

I believe that we have our database setup already and next, lets open up our Notepad++ and navigate to the index file in our tutorial folder.

lets open the file up and see what we have to do. (i will advise that you open up your web browser, point it to http://localhost/tutorial so you can preview changes easily)

we need to point that link to a page that will display the news, so we need an extra page for that, Lets duplicate the index.php file and rename the duplicated copy to "readNews.php"

to do this, navigate to the tutorial folder, copy the index.php file and paste it right in the same folder, windows will try to rename it to "Copy of index.php"
just change the name to readNews.php

another thing to note, windows is not case sensitive but linux is, so to make your file naming cross platform, you need to take note of the case when referring to the readNews.php page

now we should have 2 file inside the tutorial folder, index.php and readnews.php

we already have our index.php file opened in notepad++, lets point the link that says

<a href="#"><strong>Click here to get news update</strong></a

to

<a href="readNews.php"><strong>Click here to get news update</strong></a

we changed the href from # to readNews.php, save it and refresh the browser you opened.
when you now click on the link, it should take you to readNews.php page which displays pretty much the same thing because we duplicated the page and we are yet to modify it.

Now go ahead and open up readNews.php by going to File> open (you will notice that notepad++ will open the last directory you visited)
MAKE SURE YOU OPEN IT FROM THE SAME NOTEPAD++ INTERFACE
this will go ahead and open it up in another tab, just like firefox does.
that way, you are able to swap the interface/workarea to different pages at anytime

@webdezzi (m) great job man - u do not wear a !hash bang for nothing - i have not read your thread properly - but what i have seen so far - i am more than impressed, keep up the good job - i will link to this thread from mine - i dont have much patience in teaching php - i prefer to just pick a little topic and discuss it thoroughly and then leave space for questions - i just cleared up an ajax-based chat and also image verification captchas - in 2 short thread and even posted samples and free downloads - that way my conscience is clear (if the codes are too long to follow) - but i will answer questions from the students though.

Thanks Dhtml for dropping by.

The goal of the readNews.php page will be to fetch news from the database and display it.

even though we have no news in our database right now, we can still code it to display news then we will insert news later on

the first thing we might want to do is connect to our database
and php has it's way of connecting,

mysql_pconnect ( "server" , "username" , "password " ); (opens a persistent connection, so the connection remains opened throughout the script)

mysql_connect ( "server" , "username" , "password " ); (opens a non-persistent connection)


any of this will work but i prefer to use the one with pconnect

our server will always be localhost, even when you upload your website to the web. (if your mysql server is running on another computer, then your server will be that computer's IP address or domain name)
the username will be the username of the user allowed to connect to the database
the password will also be the corresponding password to that username.

It looks cool, right?

Now let us assign that connection to a variable, so next time we need to use that resource (the connection resource), we just use the variable we are about to assign it to

$conn=mysql_pconnect ( "localhost" , "root" , "" ); // right now i have no password set to my database, if you have it set up for yours, then go ahead and use it

since we will be using this line on more than one page, we will go ahead and put that line in another file, then we will just include it in any of our script that requires connecting to the database. That way, we only have to change content of the newly created file and it updates throughout our script

Lets create another file, this time, lets call it conn.php and put this line of code in it

From now on, i will be adding comment to the codes as it is good programming practice

to add comment in php, you  can do any of these
1. add double forward slashes to the beginning of the comment, and the comment will be ignored by the php engine e.g //this is a comment
2. for multiline comment,  add a forward slash with asterisk and end the multiline with asterisk and forward slash like this
3. you can also use #, like python uses e.g. # this is another comment, but no a multiline comment

/* this is the beginning of a muiltiline comment
you can even go ahead and add more comments
no problem as long as you end it with this */

<?php
$server="localhost"; //this is the server hosting mysql database
$username="root"; //this is the username allowed by the database to login
$password=""; //the password
$conn=mysql_pconnect ( $server , $username , $password ) or die(mysql_error());

// you can see how i have replaced the pconnect parameters with already defined variables.
//variables in php must start with "$", followed by any character from "a-z", "A-Z", or "_"
// you cannot have a variable like this $2detro, a variable name cannot start with a number
//anyone can create a variable just like i creates $serv, $username, $password and $conn. You can create yours too with any character of any length
// Note that variables are case sensive, meaning $username is not the same as $userName
// in PHP, you can overwrite variables, with the "=" sign.


?>

";" the semicolon sign must end every statement in php, else, you will get a syntax error, unexpected T_INCLUDE, expecting ',' or ';'

you dont have to bother about what a statement is and what a statement isn't, just take note of when i use ";", before you know it
you will get it naturally.

curly braces "{" and "}" in php help with handling conditions, example

this is similar to a mother breastfeeding her baby,

if (the baby's head is closest to the right)

{the baby gets the right breast;} else {the baby gets the left breast;}

another situation could be when you have a loop, curly braces also works there

while (the music is rolling){we keep dancing;}

what this means is, if the music does not stop, we will not stop dancing (even if it rolls for 3 years).
once the music stops , then we stop dancing

thats just by the way, Now we continue tommorrow by including the coon.php file into our readNews.php so that we can fetch content from our database.
bye for now, and please ask questions when confused.