Day 1 in PHP, Very New to this..

clarkhaddock

I am trying to teach myself PHP. Just the basics so i can edit parts of my site. I am not looking to create any scripts, just change the layout of a page with the scripts or give them a new heading on a page of change the color or size of the text. Soemthing like instaed of 1. Select your Color as a table headeing i would change it to Step 1. Select your color. Little things like that. Can anyone help me by telling me where to start? My first goal is to change my homepage layout. I know a little about HTML from classes i took awhile back and I can use software like dreamweaver.

bpat1434

If you want a hint: Stay AWAY from Dreamweaver
That is, until you understand exactly what you're doing with HTML and PHP. Dreamweaver is not anybodys dream weaver (haha... I made a funny!).

I'd say, download a good editor (PHPEdit, EditPlus 2) and start there. They come with HTML and PHP syntax highlighting, and can really go a long way.

The other thing would be to try and see what happens when you edit minor things. Like changing words, or whatever. You'll learn more by doing and screwing up than you will by continually succeeding.

~Brett

Roger_Ramjet

Layout and styling have nothing to do with php. They should also have nothing to do with the html that php generates. Presentation is a matter for Cascading Style Sheets , which are really very straightforward to use. Try this tutorial and you will see what I mean.

Now of course you already have a site and so it's too late if it has not been designed for CSS. 😃 But if you are getting into this then you might as well learn how it should be done. You'll also find it makes life so much easier when you seperate style from content - far less html to generate or wade through when working on the php scripts.

Plenty of php tutorials around - you could do worse than start with the ones here. But play with it as Brett sez - it's the truth that we learn from our mistakes, especially wwhen it comes to programming, so the more you play the more you learn.

clarkhaddock

stupid question but i have found on my server where all of my pages are stored under modules but the one page i can not find is my, what i would think it would be called, INDEX page. the basic layout of all of the pages. the section that has my top tool bar and side tool bar. Is that storeed somewhere else? The folder i am in has my company info, the checkout page layout, the catalog page layout, etc.. but i can not find the other page. is there a common name it could have been called that i sould look out for?

thorpe

we cant really answer most of these questions. it really depends on the layout the initial developer used. im assuming your using some sort of cms. where did you get this cms from? why dont you check out the homepage for said cms, most decent cms's have tutorials on how to change the layout etc.