Introduction

My first encounter with PHP came about 10 years ago. By that time, I already had plenty of experience developing websites. I had started out writing HTML in a text editor before settling on Dreamweaver as my favorite authoring tool. A new project involved publishing more than 30 articles a day. It was a subscription service, so the site needed to be password-protected and searchable. An ordinary website wouldn’t do. That’s when PHP came to the rescue.

PHP makes communication with a database a breeze, so content can be stored in the database, making it searchable. Instead of creating a new page for every article, pages are populated dynamically with the requested items. You can also password-protect the administrative or members-only ...

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