Creating the CMS (Part 1)

The CMS that I built would be based on PHP and HTML. To learn the basics, I took a course on CodeAcademy and watched a 1 hour video on the introduction to PHP. Once I got the basics, I used the information from W3schools to construct a simple mechanism to pull information from a database.

Once I built the simple mechanic, I realized that I was missing a database.

To set up a database and run the PHP code, I had to set up WAMP. With WAMP standing for:

W – Windows

A – Apache

M – MySQL

P – PHP

Following the instructions I’ve used to set up Wordpress (which required WAMP to run if it were to be hosted locally) and the previous blog I’ve written regarding the setting up of WAMP (docaok5.blogspot.com), I managed to set up the application relatively quickly.

Setting up WAMP

Once that was done I ran the program and signed into phpmyadmin to set up a database (default login would be user: root password: (empty)). From there everything was rather self-explanatory and simple. Using common sense I created a database with the name of “student_council”.

After that was done, I then started building the program. There were three parts to the program: inputing the information, connecting to the database, and finally, sending the info to the database.

So first I had to create an input form. This would be made solely out of HTML and would have PHP applied to it later. Using the information from the database, I created three text-boxes (First Name, Last Name, Email).

Submitting information form

Once that was done, I made a simple file to connect with the database. This was created solely out of PHP and requires the proper credentials to function properly. The main line of code was “$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);” in order to check if the query was sent successfully, I had to write an if statement that would print out the problem.