Jack of All Trades Web Development

PHP, Development

Without much prior PHP knowledge, I managed to program this blog in less than a week. Here is how I did it. Note: This is an overview and not actual code examples.

1. First, I went through Code Grrl's Build a Blog Tutorials

   Sure, I could have stopped there but I really didn't like how the blog was programmed. I like this tutorial though because I dug through the code and learned basic PHP, but I wanted much more functionality.

2. I wanted clean URLs so I found Making "clean" URLs with Apache

   I customized the url so I can add keywords inside it if I want. I love these clean URLs. Apache also has documentation on mod_rewrite.

3. Then I added user authentication

   This was the most basic, yet effective login script I found. Of course I modded it to make it a little more secure.

4. I rewrote the code to use Object Oriented PHP

   My blog was basically built but I didn't like how the code looked. I thought PHP looked horrible until I ran into some object oriented code. Makes things look much nicer.

5. Created Tag Cloud Navigation

   I started with ByteMyCode's Tag Cloud code and then moved to selecting from the database with the "LIKE" MySQL commmand.

   $sql = "SELECT * FROM php_blog WHERE tags LIKE '%$tag%' ORDER BY timestamp DESC";

   I also had to count the tags so I used the array_count_values PHP function.

   $tags = array_count_values($DBtags); // a very useful function to count the tags!

   Wow gotta love those tags!

6. Added More Features

   I added an image uploader to my admin page, RSS 2.0 and many minor tweaks until I had my very own customized blog built from scratch!

Some functions I found very useful on php.net:

list()
split()
htmlspecialchars()
str_replace()
explode()
include(dirname(__FILE__)

Without knowing much PHP I now have my own custom blog! You can too! I heavily modified each example and made them my own. It feels so nice to have a custom blog!

Comments

• #1. leo on Mar 23 2008

  mind to give out your source code?

• #2. radman on Apr 07 2008

  Thank you Marc,
  This article really helping for me.
  I think we don't need to know the source code, to build our own blog.
  With this instruction, we can do it without have to know the source code.

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