What is PHP?

Its official name is PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a powerful server side pre-hypertext open source markup language.

This means that when a visitor is on your web site and pulls up a page in their browser, any PHP commands are executed by the server prior to the visitor seeing the output of the commands. In this way, no one can see the PHP source code that is outputting the HTML text to the page. This means, that no one can copy and paste the source code by viewing the page source like they can with Javascript and basic HTML.

In order to run PHP, it has to be installed on the web server. You can even install it on a local PC but be warned, having done this myself a few times, it is not an easy task.

PHP allows you to do anything you wish with your site. It can do on the fly thinking and allow you to create robust and dynamic sites.

A few of the functions or PHP are:

• Performs system functions such as create, open, read from write to, close files, execute commands based on user input.

• Gather and process data submitted through web forms.

• Interface with databases and create on the fly content.

PHP does a whole lot more. As the PHP community continues improving the overall language, new versions of PHP are released. The latest version to release as of this writing is PHP5.