How to get started on your first PHP/MySQL app

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Coding, Geeky

We've all got great ideas for the next big thing. Before you invest in a personalized license plate that says 'Web20' or 'AJAX 7334', you'll need to develop a simple way of getting information in and out of a web server.

There are many ways to do this, but I like PHP and MySQL, because they are easy and cheap. (PHP and MySQL are free, but you can find hosting on a PHP-MySQL server for as low as $8/month.)

So let's say we want to build a web app…

Step 1: lay out what info you're going to need

I think of it like this: if you were to do this process on paper, what would you need? First of all, you'll need User information. On a 'User Information' sheet, I might have the following info:

User Info
  • First Name
  • Last name
  • Employee ID number
  • Email Address

OK, so that's pretty easy to figure out. It's also easy to take this info and plan out how you're going to store the info in a MySQL table. (a MySQL table is like a spreadsheet in Excel (OpenOffice Calc!)) So I will take my data requirements and make a table called user_info, as follows. I will also define what will be in each data type. I also need to add some more fields…


user_info
  • *user_id
  • passwd
  • fname
  • lname
  • email

(* this data will be required to be unique – I can't have 2 users with the same name!)

This is going to lay out a table in MySQL that looks like this when it is full:


user_id passwd fname lname email
php_ddy phpisneat John Doe jdoe@isp.com
supr_lady mysqlissweet Jane Doe janed@isp.com

Each row is called a record, and contains all of that person's info. The user info table is pretty standard, but what other tables you will need depend on your application. Let's say we're making a simple chat room web page. Another table we will need will be for people's comments, like this:


user_id time_posted date_posted text
php_ddy 13:10:09 03-15-2006 hi jane!
supr_lady 13:10:13 03-15-2006 hi john, what's up?
php_ddy 13:10:17 03-15-2006 nothing much, just saying hi.

Now the important thing to notice here is my re-use of user_id. By re-using this data, I can now link the two tables together.

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Comments (3) | April 28th, 2006

3 Responses to “How to get started on your first PHP/MySQL app”

  1. neoncheez Says:
    April 29, 2006 at 10:56 pm

    good basic article, it was fluent. are you going to write more on the subject?

  2. The Technocrat Says:
    April 30, 2006 at 8:21 am

    sure am, gotta start out slow though… :-)

  3. AtariBoy Says:
    May 2, 2006 at 9:54 am

    A good read, only thing i disagree with is Zoomr, i think its a shameless copy of flickr with 1 or 2 little aditions. Its not anything special they just took flickrs idea and added a little bit more.

    Grrrrr

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