You said cgi, so I'll assume that you know perl. If you know perl, then you know a lot of php already. In fact, you can even run perl scripts from php. You can also run system calls so you have full access to sendmail and other unix and/or nt utilities.
One of the nicest things about php is that there is rarely a need to parse a string of name value pairs. This is done automatically by php. So, if you have an input field named firstname, just submit that to a php script and you can refer to the var: $firstname right away. Php knows which value you are referring to.
I guess I'd also use some sql implementation with the kind of site you are talking about. Mysql for instance, which works nicely with php.
Php also works fine with odbc compliant databases and you can turn on ansi compliant in mysql if you want. The point is you'll want to know some sql as well as php.
To get the 3 most recent press releases you could just request them from the database and use php to format the html page with the results. Often, it's more important to understand mysql's implementation of sql than to know php inside and out. www.mysql.com
Say for instance, that you were able to grab the data you wanted from a mysql table and you had the result set in a variable called $result with the three most recent releases.
To display the info you could write:
<table>
<!-- escape into php -->
<?PHP
while($release = mysql_fetch_object($result))
{
echo "<tr><td>";
echo "$release->releaseContent";
echo "</td></tr>";
}
?>
<!-- escape back to html -->
</table>
(where releaseContent is the column with the pertinent text in it)
That little bit of code would print out your three releases.
Well, this is by no means a meaningful php tutorial but it is hopefully useful to you.
tons of links from this pg:
http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/Languages/PHP/index.html
Also, go to www.php.net to find the manual which has a great little search feature.
PHP is great. It's simple, yet very powerful. Love it.
matt.
