Originally posted by Xterrian:
Can anyone suggest a basic tutorial for MySQL and PHP? The database and webpages won't be on the actual internet. They will be in a folder on the server and accessed there. Everytime I click on an asp page on the server it opens Frontpage instead of IE. I don't know diddly about php or MySQL. I need a website that tells me how they work from the most basic level. I hope I don't have too much trouble doing this. I wrote my first app in Cold Fusion the first weekend I got it. It was very easy. Hopefully these other two aren't much harder to pick up. Thanks!
The reason you're having problems with ASP pages opening in frontpage instead of IE, is ASP pages must be served up by a IIS or another web server with ASP processing cabability. You cannot directly open them with IE, they have to be processed by the server to work.
A very highlevel overview is this... When you write an ASP page, you enclose the ASP code in <% %> tags, which can be intermixed with standard HTML...
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>EXAMPLE</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<%
Dim sHello
sHello = "Hello World!"
Response.Write "<B>" & sHello & "</B>"
%>
</BODY>
</HTML>When the webserver gets the request for this file, it knows to process it with the ASP engine, which looks for the <% %> tags, processes the contents, and generates the output, which should be pure HTML... What results would be this, no more ASP code.
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>EXAMPLE</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<B>Hello World!</B>
</BODY>
</HTML>PHP (and coldfusion for that matter) work very much in the same way. You will be required to be running a webserver on the machine to serve up the files, and won't be able to just go into a folder to open them.
PHP is pretty easy to learn with cold fusion experience. Setting up connections to your DB is a bit more work because they aren't defined at the server level like in coldfusion, they have to be defined in each page. You also use more standard for or while loops when working with returns from your querys instead of the
tag.
If you're continuing to use Access, you won't use MySQL. MySQL is a database, like Access is. It's a very good free DB, but does not have the same pretty desktop interface that Access has. Unless you're willing to move your DB to MySQL and re-engineer your forms, macros and reports in PHP, MySQL isn't part of the equation for you.