PHP & HTML Tutorial site

Before you dig into the tutorial section of this website i recommend that you take a moment to read through this section, here i will go through the process of installing a local web server to your machine, you will need to do this if you wish to practice PHP or Javascript in your web pages.

First you will need to install a program called XAMPP you will be able to find this here: XAMPP

Follow the instructions for installing the program, i generally recommend that you do not install MySQL and Apache as a service mainly for security and to keep the minimum of background programs open at any time.

Once the program has installed successfully you will need to start up the Apache and MySQL service this can be done by going to start>XAMPP for windows>XAMPP Control Panel.

Now we have the Apache and MySQL server running, we can create an area for our website, on your computer navigate to C:\xampp\htdocs and create a folder for your website for example “C:\xampp\htdocs\mywebsite” this will be where all our HTML and PHP files will be saved.

Once you have created an index.html(see: Your first HTML page) file within C:\xampp\htdocs\mywebsite, you will be able to view your page by browsing to http://127.0.0.1/mywebsite/ in your favourite web browser.

I recommend that you also download a text editor with syntax highlighting, this will make troubleshooting allot easier, there are two I would recommend:

Scite: Scite
Notepad++: Notepad++