PHP Programmer

What is a PHP Programmer and why would you need one?

A PHP programmer is someone who takes a website concept and makes it a reality. A PHP programmer probably is not a designer. A designer is some one who makes a website visually appealing. A PHP programmer is the person who added the functionality.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you are visiting a automotive dealership website. It looks really nice and has a great layout. Very visually appealing. So far what I am describing is what a website designer does.

You want to look up a certain make and model of a car. You select the year, make, and model. When you press the submit button the inter workings – the PHP programming code retrieves the information you are looking for and it is displayed. That functionality is what the PHP programmer does.

A shopping cart is another example. All the pictures and glitter is from the designer. When you add a product to the shopping cart, add your billing and shipping information, and submit your credit card information, a PHP programmer creates all that functionality to include causing your products to be shipped to your home or office.

That is what I do. I am a PHP programmer. I started programming for hire in late 1987, before the Internet went public. I became a web programmer in 2000 using the Perl programming language. In 2006 I started building websites using PHP.

PHP is not the only skill that is required to be successful at building robust websites. The collection is often referred to as LAMP or LAMP stack.

Linux – the operating system used on most web servers.
Apache – handles request for website content and data. Most popular web server.
MySql – The database server. Stores your data and makes it available to your website. Very mature and very robust.
PHP- stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”. The most popular and most available programming language on the Internet. Very robust and very mature.

Add to the mix HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and Ajax.

A PHP programmer needs to have the basic skills in each of these area to be effective.

For more information please visit [about] and [why]

PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf. He originally called PHP – “Personal Home Page Tools”. Today PHP stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”.

Basically PHP is the most popular programming language on the Internet. Today web applications like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are built using the PHP programming language.

If you are looking to build an interactive website you will probably want to build it using PHP. If you have an existing PHP website you will need a PHP programmer to help you change it.

When I started programming in the 80’s there was no public Internet. When I started programming for the web there were lots of player. There was PERL, Java, and PHP. Almost every hosting provider offers PHP as part of their basic hosing package. PHP has become extremely common.

I chose to become a PHP programmer because of this.

The PHP programming language has become very robust. Very sophisticated browser based applications (read as websites) can be created using PHP.