PHP is a programming language for building websites with dynamic content. This means a site can be interactive, for example a visitor enters a username and password on a page, these are checked, and the user is logged in to the site – on an e-shop, say!
PHP is so powerful that it is used by WordPress, the largest blogging platform on the web, as well as by Facebook.
A PHP file can contain text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP code. The code runs on the server and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML.
What else can PHP do?
PHP can create, open, close, read, write and delete files on a server. It can send and receive cookies. It can also add, delete and change data in your database, and it can encrypt data.
With PHP you are not limited to producing HTML. You can generate images, PDF files and any kind of text, such as XHTML and XML.
Why use PHP?
PHP runs on all major platforms, such as Windows, Linux, Unix, macOS and so on. It works with almost every server in use today (Apache, IIS and others). It supports a wide range of databases, it is free, it is easy to learn and it runs efficiently on the server.
A little history
Work on PHP began in 1994, when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote a number of CGI programs in C that he used to maintain his personal website.
He extended them to work with forms and to talk to databases, and he called this implementation Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter – PHP/FI.
Today PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. The language keeps evolving, with new versions released at regular intervals.
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