Introduction to PHP for Website Developers

What is PHP? I could just have you visit php.net and find out for yourself, but although you would find out a lot of information about PHP you probably wouldn't really understand its use/purpose.

When you create a website using just HTML and CSS, it's "static". This means that no matter who accesses each page, all of the pages will look the same.

The reason for this is that with static web pages, the server simply regurgitates the same page (code) to each viewer. In most cases, you are going to want something better: a dynamic web page.

Flash of Unstyled Content (Annoying White Flash)

Yup, I'm about to cover one of the most prominent web page styling problems ever known to man: the Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC)!

What is it? Well, there are two different ways of explaining it:

1. To the viewer, it's that annoying white flash that you see every time you view a different page on a website when the website has a background image or background color that isn't white.
2. To the web coder, it's that short moment of time during which the page is unstyled (defaulting to a blank white page) that annoys the viewers.

Let's fix it! :)

Using the PhotoSwipe Image Gallery Script

This tutorial is in response to a specific request by someone who wanted to know how to implement the PhotoSwipe Image Gallery script into a mobile JQuery website. Here's a link to PhotoSwipe for some context and a download link of the script for yourself:

http://www.photoswipe.com/

Here is a link to what our final product will be - you should test it out:

http://thecodingwebsite.com/tutorials/photoswipe/photoswipe.html

I basically just used their code examples and example images and removed all of the unnecessary code and such to determine the essential parts needed for a mobile JQuery website implementation. If you would like to just download my working example as a whole, I have placed it into a zip file for you:

http://thecodingwebsite.com/tutorials/photoswipe.zip

An Overview of Web Pages

Index

I have created this index due to the amount of information present in this tutorial. Feel free to skim past any sections that contain information you already know. This tutorial provides the very basic information about how web pages work in general, and near the end it starts to focus a little bit on how to extend your HTML pages with CSS and JavaScript coding.

An Overview of Web Pages
W3 Schools
HTML
CSS
Extending web page capabilities
JavaScript vs. browser plugin languages
HTML basics
Head tags
Body tags
HTML page example, with CSS and JavaScript
Conclusion