This is going to be a multi-post tutorial, if you can call it a tutorial. Basically I’m going to show you my workflow when it comes to making websites. I always start from the same directory template that I made. It is comprised of five folders and some files. The folders are css, images, includes, js, and one called DONOTUPLOAD. This template is what I always start with. I copy it and rename it for the site that I’m about to work on.
I am not a PHP superstar, or even a PHP programmer. I use PHP so I don’t have to repeat a lot of code. You’ll see when you look at the files, or by following along, what I mean. PHP is a server side language, so in order to develop locally, you have to have a webserver installed locally. If you try to open up a PHP file by just dragging it into IE, or Firefox, or Safari it isn’t going to be pretty. There are many options for this. The one that I use, and is extremely easy to set-up is MAMP. MAMP stands for Macintosh, Apache, MySql and PHP. If you’re on Windows, you’ll want WAMP. I haven’t used WAMP in several years, but it wasn’t that hard to setup. When setting it up, or in its preferences you can set where the root folder is. I leave it at its default location and put a shortcut to it on my desktop. Then when I have MAMP running, I open a browser and type in http://localhost:8888 - localhost is, well, your computer (you can use the ip address of 127.0.0.1 as well) and the :8888 tells your browser to use port 8888 as opposed to the default port 80."
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