WebDev Update: PHP Contact Form

For the past year or so I have been returning to an old hobby – web development. You may have remembered my earlier post about coding and second language learning. First I worked on upgrading my knowledge of CSS (now CSS3) and HTML (HTML5), with some exercises in practical JavaScript and jQuery. I've also been working quite a bit with Twitter Bootstrap. I also dabbled in Wordpress and MySQL.

For the past month I've decided to primarily focus on dressing up some PHP samples. I took the The Complete Web Developer’s Course by Rob Percival, as well as the Code Academy PHP course, but it is still my weakest link.

PHP, short for personal homepage, is used in a multitude of popular websites including Facebook and Wordpress are among a few of them. Unlike HTML and CSS, PHP does not deal with the looks of the website, but rather deals with the functions, specifically with sending information to the host server.


PHP can be found on eCommerce sites and forums, contact pages and databases. It partners with MySQL, a program that deals with databases.

The programming language itself has evolved to PHP5, and there is a lot to learn. I've made a list of projects I would like to try to create from scratch, and then I’d learn the code accordingly:

• Create a contact form (Course)
• Learn to parse (Course)
• Create an htaccess that rewrites the .php URL extension
• create a simple content management system
• create a simple database
• design a simple chat application

I started by returning to Percival’s course and redoing the projects there, the first being a contact form. I added my own drop-down selection menu, and then dressed up the page with CSS. After I was sure it was working, I inserted a small bit of code from W3Schools that prevents spammers and hackers from creating havoc. It was a short line of code, and I have seen dozens of alternatives in my searches for a good validation, so I'm sure I will continue to play with the code.

Currently I'm still working a professional website that will act as a portfolio. Once that is finished, I plan to continue repeating Percival’s program, before going off on my own to explore.