Inside programmer’s mind – How to build a custom web site with php
Today will be a little different. I’m going to show you how to build a custom web site with php.
I know I usually talk about generating income online and the strategies, techniques and tools you need to learn.
Of course, you don’t need to learn PHP or how to build a custom web site with php to do that.
Where to start?
The first thing you need to do to learn how to build a custom web site with php is obvious.
You need to learn php.
There are lots of tutorials online to learn that and I can’t cover that here.
The next thing you need is a place to host your code.
Again, there are many options for that and you can find something that works for you.
Once you have a place to host your php code, you can start coding.
What setup do I have?
I’ve created multiple web sites using PHP and the most recent that I’m focusing on these days is Click eCourse.
I use a LAMP platform which means:
- A Linux hosting server
- Apache as the web server
- MySQL as the backend database
- PHP as the backend code
I also have other infrastructure stuff that helps in giving customers like you on Click eCourse such as:
- Hosted physical servers on OVH
- VMWare ESX running on those servers
- Docker images with various components
- Gitea to host the code
- Jenkins to bundle the code into docker images and deploy them
- Selenum tests to verify the images can be deployed in production
I use Chrome browser to debug the frontend code.
What is difference between frontend and backend code?
You will very often hear talk about frontend and backend and you might be wondering what that means.
I’ll try to explain…
Basically, when you access a web site, like https://clickecourse.com, the backend code inside the index.php file receives the request.
So, at first, the backend code executes.
This backend code is what is responsible for verifying the user accessing is valid, their password is good, they have the right permissions, etc…
The backend code reads the database and figures out what is being accessed from the URL. For example, if you access https://clickecourse.com/courses or https://clickecourse.com/plans, you will get different result because the backend knows you are on plans or courses page.
As for the frontend, that is what the user sees.
It’s the layout of the page, the colors, the fonts, the images.
It’s also the code that figures out what should be displayed and does additional requests to the backend for data needed.
The frontend also include CSS, which is how you can customize the fonts, colors, look of the frontend.
What else would you need?
The very basic you need is to learn PHP as well as know HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Start by going through tutorials on those things.
Then you will want to learn SQL and how to setup an SQL server.
Although, you might find a platform that has it all setup for you and you just need to put in place your php code.
Obviously, I know it’s quite a complicated thing to learn how to build a custom web site with php as I’m sure you can tell.
Conclusion
I hope this gives you a glimpse into the complexities of what it takes to build a custom web site with php
I didn’t mean to imply it was easy, but just like anything else, it’s a set of skills that need to be learned and then implement what is learned.
Watch the video to get more details on what goes on my daily activities and what the code looks like.
Make sure to share this so that others can learn too.
