: PHP

PHP is a popular free-ware web applications development tool. The "form interpreter", or preprocessor, and PHP's server-side scripting language allows one to write simple scripts and include them directly in HTML files (HTML-embedded). By including support for various databases, it also makes it trivial to develop database enabled web pages. Many people find the embedded nature much easier to deal with than trying to create separate HTML and CGI files. For more information about its supported features, see http://www.php.net/ and a wealth of help is available at http://www.phpbuilder.com.  Great tutorials are available at http://www.devshed.com.

Like other preprocessed, html-embedded scripting languages, it has many of the more useful features of Perl but is designed for HTML development in mind. It eliminates the need for numerous small Perl CGI programs by allowing you to place simple scripts directly in your HTML files. This speeds up the overall performance of your web pages since the overhead of forking Perl several times has been eliminated. It also makes it easier to manage large web sites by placing all components of a web page in a single html file.

PHP works great with MySQL for database applications.  Please see the MySQL page for details and an example in using this.

We have provided some sample code for adding the ability to have a file upload page here.

The current version of PHP/Apache running on our servers is
Apache/1.3.41 Ben-SSL/1.59 (Unix) PHP/4.3.11 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_perl/1.30
with MySQL, FreeType, XML, Imap, FTP, CURL, and GD support included.

Using PHP on your Site

No installation is necessary to use PHP on your site. Our servers are already configured to take advantage of it.  Simply name your web page with a .phtml, .php3, .php, or .php4 extension and the page will be parsed through the PHP processor.

Documentation

More information and full documentation is available at http://www.php.net