The Joy of PHP

I’ve never quite understood the appeal of PHP, but now that I’ve played around with it a little, I find that it really would make revamping the site much easier. I could also use it to replace my perl hit tracker; using the logging examples at phpfreaks and phpbuilder, I put together a PHP tracker that does everything my current Perl version does except for automatically omitting me from the logs and writing a new file every day.

I also found this advice on avoiding echo eye-opening. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d want to know and that my PHP book from Buck-a-Book isn’t telling me.

2 Responses to “The Joy of PHP”

  1. Stewart Johnson Says:

    Hi. While you’re fooling about with PHP on your blog, I would recommend you think about keeping the separation of content, structure and formatting. You may want to look into Smarty (check out the Crash Course), I heard about it on Brad Choate’s blog. I think he’s doing something like:

    Content — MT 2.63 (database) -> Smarty(PHP) (*.php)
    Structure — template files (*.tpl)
    Formatting — Stylesheets (*.css)

    It seems like a very clean structure, check out his Preferences.

  2. Jemima Says:

    Thanks for the links, but the php is mainly for archiving and indexing stories, for which an XML-based solution is in the works.