PHP Website Development

PHP(short for Hypertext PreProcessor) is the most widely used open source and general-purpose server-side scripting language used mainly in web development to create dynamic websites and applications. It was developed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. A survey by W3Tech shows that almost 79% of the websites in their data are developed using PHP. It is not only used to build the web apps of many tech giants like Facebook but is also used to build many CMS (Content Management systems) like WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.

Why use PHP?

PHP can do anything related to server-side scripting or more popularly known as the backend of a website. For example, PHP can receive data from forms, generate dynamic page content, can work with databases, create sessions, send and receive cookies, send emails, etc. There are also many hash functions available in PHP to encrypt users’ data that make PHP secure and reliable to be used as a server-side scripting language. So these are some of the abilities of PHP that make it suitable to be used as a server-side scripting language. You will get to know more of these abilities in further tutorials.

Even if you are not convinced by the above abilities of PHP, there are some more features of PHP. PHP can run on all major operating systems like Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc. Almost all of the major servers available today like Apache supports PHP. PHP allows using a wide range of databases. And the most important factor is that it is free to use and download and anyone can download PHP from its official source: