| The best
place to find out
about PHP is the PHP web
site (or the UK
Mirror site). An HTML version of the PHP Manual is available on-site (and can be searched) and other formats are
available elsewhere
(9 Mbytes).
Notes:
- all
PHP scripts run with the privileges of
the owner of each script. This allows most of the
available add-on modules for PHP to be
installed without compromising the security of users' files; it also allows the minimum
access privileges to be set on any PHP files that contain login information (in
Unix terms, this means read access only to the owner of the PHP file, group and
world access being "none").
- you
can run your scripts using either PHP version 4 or version 5 by
creating a file named "ht.access" (or ".htaccess") in the folder
containing your scripts and then adding the line
AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php
to
the file. All scripts in the folder and its subfolders will then run
using PHP version 5. Omitting the line will result in the scripts
running under version 4; you might want to look at the differences between version 4 and 5; - a
visit to
this URL
lists the add-on modules currently installed as well as giving some
other
useful information about PHP - the link is
available only to users connected to the campus network.
- more details about these features are available from this Web page.
Files
(i.e. Web pages) containing embedded PHP statements
should have the extension php.
Examples
The
central header bar can be included in any PHP file via the (PHP)
statement:
virtual("/cgi-bin/include.cgi?section=my_section_name");
Here is an example
of
using PHP to allow authentication over the Web using your central
systems userid and password; this time using a Microsoft Active
Directory server as the authenticator. The source is available here. Here
is an example
(and its trivial source)
that will automatically redirect browsers from one page to another (in
this case to /dit/). - Direct access to the Internet from web-based applications is not possible - your
application must be written to use the central proxy service to connect to
external web sites or services. Here is
the source of one example of how to fetch
RSS
feeds from external sites while using the proxy.
Related topics PHP
includes functions to connect to various database packages. One of the
most popular used in conjunction with PHP is MySQL. See www.abdn.ac.uk/local/mysql for
more information.
It is also possible to connect to the central SQL Server cluster via PHP - please
contact the Service Desk if you need to do this. | 
