The fact that a growing number of webmasters still do not know how to code in PHP is pretty astounding in my mind. With such a great amount of power that the language brings to the table, one would think it’d be a top priority.

Entire Content Management Systems (CMS) – WordPress, Joomla, and PHPBB – are built with the power of PHP (and MYSQL). The bottom line is, it’s a really powerful language.

The question, however, still lingers, as to why you should use it. Why should each average webmaster take their time to learn the language?

Why You Should Learn PHP

Save Time and Hassle

The very first website I designed didn’t include a lick of PHP – it was a website that, as I recall, was 15 HTML pages. While it looked okay (for my skills at the time), it had one fatal error – when I needed to make a site-wide change.

If, at some point, I decided to change the layout of the website, or even update an error in my navigation bar (both of which did happen), it would require the manual editing of every single page. While updating 15 pages by hand to a new theme or a new menu change doesn’t seem like it’d take too long (which it did), imagine it on an even larger scale.

It’s not hard to accumulate 50-200 pages on a website (especially if it’s a blog) in a few short months – imagine having to go and update each and every page one by one every time you need a new theme.

PHP offers a better solution – creating one universal file that will can be loaded on as many pages as needed, and only having to update one page. My new website, for example, has a header file that is used, universally, on every page on the website. Whenever I make a change to it, I change the single file and everything updates. It’s magical (and only requires a bit of PHP work!).

If you want to learn more about making a dynamic website with PHP, go ahead and visit these resources:

• DreaminCode – Create a Dynamic Website
• Getting Started With PHP and Dynamic Content

Save Money

Throughout the last several weeks, I have been eagerly developing a brand new site of mine (which will be unveiled very soon!). Given the nature of the project, it is very PHP intensive (but surprisingly lightweight!).

The code I have been writing for the website features no special tricks, but would run up one hefty price-tag from nearly any web-developer you could come across. Besides the time devotion, it isn’t incredibly hard to get functioning, either.

You can, thus, save yourself the trouble of having to open up your wallet for a web-developer if you can take some time out of your day to learn an incredibly simple and useful language.

The extent of PHP’s capability is astounding – it can make decisions, interact with a database, and a whole mess of other neat things.

Do You Know PHP?

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