PHP Programming Tips

I have compiled my five tips for learning PHP quickly for beginners. It is sometimes difficult to get started when learning a new programming language and I hope these tips help you. These tips will help you stay organized, learn quickly, and help get over any hurdles you may encounter.

Let’s get started.

Tip 1) Start fresh. I try to start every project with a fresh clean page. If you try to take code from someone else and convert it to yours syntax can get missed or worse they may not have done it right either. As you get going you can make a template of all the things you might put in a project like title and other things but starting out I like to start fresh. This also helps work the basic set up into every project.

Tip 2) Use error reporting. All PHP has a snippet of code that will allow you to see any errors that may come up.


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A lot of people will talk about keyword targeting, but aren’t 100% sure what it’s all about. Some people have a general idea about it, but don’t go about it the right way. You want top listing on the search engines, and you need to target keywords, so you get a #1 listing. If you sell green crystal watches, most people will target “Green crystal watches”, which this is highly targeted, if the search term is only getting 10 searches a month, you might only get 1-2 visitors from it, which means you’re not going to any noticeable about of sales or conversions from it.

The best thing to do, is to get a keyword search tool, there is a nice one called “good keywords” which is free, also you can use Google AdWords research tool, or msn adcenter research tool, I find these better as they are up to date and are great at making suggestions. What you want to do is try and find a set of keywords that are related to your products, but get a good amount of monthly searches, once you have come up with a list, you want to start targeting the phases you have (a phase is a keyword that is two words or more). It is usually best if you use multiple sources for your keyword research, as you can get a broader picture, which will be more beneficial in the long run, as you’ll then be targeting the general market, and not just the visitors to one search engine.

The more targeted your keyword is the better, but also you want the keywords to have a high amount of search made for it every month, striking a balance if often an art in itself, but with a little practice you can get it to a level that you are able to work with (ie amount of work in relation to how many visitors you get from it).

Writing articles is a great way to target keywords you are trying to rank for, writing articles about your keywords, and publishing them on your site, and then building backlinks is one of the most efficient ways to raise your rankings to the first page. Another way is to buy links on websites with a similar content / products and getting them to link directly to your product / content pages for that keywords with the keyword in the link text. Another way to get links with Articles is to publish them to article directories with your keywords in the bio box linking back to your website.

Keyword marketing is more important than most people realize, as if you chose the wrong keywords, and work on building them, they could be dead weight as they get no searches, the opposite is also true, if you choose an extremely highly completive keyword (just say watches) then you’ll need to do an excessive amount of work to get to the front page, which might not be viable for your company in regards to much you’ll need to spend to get the rankings.

Often you will be required to store a date in MySQL. Either upon an update of an existing record, or on a fresh insert of a new record. Good programmers are particular about the type and quality of data that is stored in a MySQL database. Sometime you do not want the date to be created by MySQL at the time of the insert or update. Rather, you want the date to be created in PHP during code execution. Although the time difference from the date creation could be well under a few milliseconds, there is a difference. This difference could add up if several transactional sequences must happen.

A simple alternative is to create the date in PHP and then transfer that information to the query that will by run by your database server.

Below you will find a quick method to generate the date value for the two types of MySQL field types: date, and datetime.

Step 1. Create a field in your database that is either date or datetime.
If the field is of type date, it will have this format: [Year-Month-Day]. If the field is of type datetime, it will have this format: [Year-Month-Day Hour:Minute:Second]
Step 2. After you have created the SQL to be used in the MySQL Query, populate the date field with either the variable $now or $today. Doing so, will match the insert or update date/time field in PHP, to that used in your MySQL database.

This PHP Program is useful when you want to upload images only.

$numoffiles = 5;
echo '

‘;

if(isset($_POST['action']))
{
$uploaddir = ‘C:/PHP/uploadtemp/’;
for ($i =0; $i<$numoffiles; $i++)
{
$filename = $_FILES['file']['name'][$i];
$filetmp = $_FILES['file']['tmp_name'][$i];
$filesize = $_FILES['file']['size'][$i];
$filetype = $_FILES['file']['type'][$i];
$ext = substr(strrchr($filename, "."),1);
$conf = $uploaddir . $filename;
$filepath = $uploaddir . $filename;

if ($filename != "")
{

if (!file_exists($filepath))
{
if ($ext == "jpg" || $ext == "gif" || $ext == "tiff" || $ext == "png" || $ext == "bmp")
{
if($filesize < "500000")
{
$upload = move_uploaded_file($filetmp, $filepath);
echo '‘. $filename . ‘ was successfully uploaded…
‘;
}
else
{
echo ‘‘.$filename . ‘ greater than the maximum file size allowed…
‘;
}
}
else
{
echo ‘‘. $filename . ‘ is invalid file type…
‘;
}
}
else
{
echo $filename . ‘ already exists…
‘;
}
}