I made this project as an assignment for a class while studying at Miracosta College. The overall scope of the project was the create a responsive, mobile-first template with dynamic elements utilizing PHP & JQuery. This is the result of that project. Eager to contribute some goodness to the web community, I figured I share my source files with anyone aspiring to learn a bit more about PHP and how adding a few snippets can drastically increase your workflow and your site's performance.

Simply put, static websites aren't cutting it anymore.

Why PHP?

It's simple really. Online business needs are consistantely and persistantely changing. Becoming ever more demanding, it's becoming more difficult to effectively meet these needs using standard HTML/CSS symantics. For example, imagine having a website with 20+ pages. You've decided you need to add a new navigation menu to your site to allow users to view a portfolio. With a navigation menu coded in HTML, you'd need to go into every instance of that navigation throughout the site, and make the change. Not only would this be time consuming, but the likelyhood of overlooking links is greater. With PHP, you'd only need to add/update your menu in your navigations main file, and the rest will dynamically populate the new item throughout the site for you. Say 20 pages is simple. Imagine if it was 100+!

More Benefits

• Simple
  • Though similar to C and Java, PHP is a more simplistic, easier to learn and implement scripting language.
• Higher Returns
  • The web is about getting your site to be sticky. PHP enables you to create dynamic websites which increases user participation, increasing your stickiness, which could yield higher returns.
• Implementation
  • What's really great about PHP is it's ability to simple embed within your HMTL markup. Often it's as simple as adding a few new tags around your items and VOILA!, your site become dynamic.

Because it seems we all want to show the world something we've done, I figured what's a demo without a portfolio or the ability to share images with your friends, fans, & followers. Using PHP, I've created a dynamically loading image gallery.

Remember the last time you wanted to add a image to your website? You had to upload the file, locate your gallery, then imput the code. Which could be a very lenthy process if your uploading a ton of images.

Adding PHP

Instead of creating this gallery using only HTML and JQuery, I also used some PHP script to dynamically load the images from the gallery file within my site's source files. If you remember the navigation menu illustration above, the same things applies. Simply upload your new images to the main folder containing you gallery, and ABRA KADABRA!, your new images will dynamically populate into your gallery of images.