What Is Php And How To Use It

The benefit to using PHP is that it lets developers display far more interactive and dynamic web page content without bogging down the browser or consuming the user’s CPU. These scripts are embedded directly into the web page HTML that produces that static content of the page.

How to Embed PHP Into a Web Page

Embedding PHP functions into an HTML web page is very easy. Just preface the script with at the end of the script. Everything in between these tags will run on the server as a PHP script. The output of that script will be displayed on the page where you embedded it. One of the simplest PHP functions is the “echo” function, which returns plain text. Embedding a simple PHP function like this works as follows: When you open this file from a web browser, the output will look like this:

As you can see, the PHP script ran on the server and simply provided an output of the “echo” text you specified. This outputs in the form of the HTML static text “Hello World!”. Things get much more interesting when you start using more advanced PHP functions (see below).

How Does PHP Work?

Unlike HTML, you can’t just create a PHP file on your computer and then open the file with your browser. This is because your computer would need PHP installed so that it can process requests to execute PHP scripts. The way pages with PHP scripts normally work is that your browser will open the page that’s stored on a remote web server somewhere on the internet. That web server has PHP installed and can process any PHP script requests that are called on that page.

The order that this works is as follows. This process involves all script processing taking place on the server rather than in your browser. The only demand put on your computer’s CPU is loading the static HTML content in the browser. All PHP script processing happens on the web server rather than your computer. This makes web pages and interactions with the page more efficient and faster. This is more efficient than browser-side scripting languages like Javascript processed by the browser and consuming your CPU resources to work.

PHP Script Example

Let’s look at a typical real-world example of a PHP script on a modern web page. For WordPress sites, most web pages have PHP scripts that look up settings in the WordPress site configuration and format the page accordingly. PHP scripts can use conditional statements like “IF” to vary page output depending on those input conditions. In the script below, the PHP script checks the “socialFooter” WordPress configuration. If the user has enabled this, then the PHP script displays the social footer section. Otherwise, it won’t display anything. Inside this PHP IF statement, you’ll also notice individual IF statements that check which social network icons were enabled or disabled in the settings. The PHP script will only output the social media icons that were enabled in settings.