How to separe PHP code and HTML presentation with Smarty, part 2: installation
Note: this is article is cut in parts, this is the the second one. Visit the first one if you don't know what Smarty is and why to use it. The post supposes basic PHP programming skills.
Ok, last time we examined the goods and bads of using Smarty, this time we'll install it.
How to separe PHP code and HTML presentation with Smarty, part 1
Note: this is article is cut in parts, this is the only the first one. More to come.
Programming in PHP without separating content and code can lead to unwanted results, low mantainability and slower production. Even nowadays you can find tons of scripts written by filling HTML pages with chunks of code.
How to set up a test server that supports multiple sites and is accessible from outside
Before using a test server, my web programming experience was really slower. In fact, every time I had to modify something or try a piece of code, I had to upload it first to my remote server. If the Internet connection had a fluctuation, I could not continue working at all. This also meant I had to first set up a test website if I didn't work on the live address. One day I had the curiosity of checking out one of these LAMP distributions (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), just with the Linux variable taken out. They call them a LAMP package for Windows. It contains a preconfigured Apache 2 server with PHP 4 and 5, a switcher between the two, MySQL 5 (you even got a phpMyAdmin script already set up) and a mail server called Mercury32 that enables you to send and receive mails from your own scripts, check out newsletters and so on.