PHP or PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a very powerful open source server side scripting language used for creating dynamic web pages. A Server side scripting language is a language that is read on the server side and not the client side. When a user accesses a web site written in PHP the web server will read the page and output HTML to the users web browser. HTML is different than PHP in that HTML is a client side language, when a user requests an HTML page the web server simply send the text in the HTML page to the users browser which then formats that page based on the HTML. MySQL is also a free open source software the is used to create databases that are used primarily by web servers. The My stands for the name of the co-founders daughter, My while the SQL stands for structured Query Language.

Mixing PHP and MySQL together in a website will give you unlimited possibilities of what you can produce. One little problem with developing websites in PHP is that since it is a server side scripting language you have to open the page from a web server to view it properly. Unlike HTML where you can save an HTML document on your desktop and then view it from there, PHP needs that server interaction to view properly. The good news is most web hosting companies provide PHP and MySQL for a pretty cheap cost to the users.

Every business site needs good fresh content, which gives the customers something to learn about or enjoy while visiting your online business website. Maintaining a content driven website can be very time consuming and very detailed in order to present the best impression of your web presence, products and service. Rewriting clusters of HTML files to present a fresh new look would take endless hours of hard work. The answer to these problems is a website design that is database driven websites built with PHP and MySQL.

To appreciate data driven websites built with PHP & MySQL, you first must be familiar with the way in which a normal web page works. Standard non-database driven web pages will not change anytime the web page is loaded on a web browser. Nor will the standard web page change by use of clicking a graphic button. Normal web pages just load and unload. Standard web pages always look the same and their web content stay unchanged. Unless of course if there is new content or web designs manually uploaded to create a new version of the average web page. Data driven websites built with PHP and MySQL perform oppositely, as they are able to change every time they upload with out you having to make changes by hand.

PHP and MySQL work together to help you do what seems like magical things with Web sites. Long ago, way back in the 1994 dark ages of the Internet, a very good thing happened. A genius named Rasmus Lerdorf wanted a way to track how many visitors came to his online resume. So, to count the number of his online resume visitors, Lerdorf created PHP. At that time, PHP stood for Personal Home Page.

Today counting site visitors is something we take for granted, as there are many tools and gizmos available for this common analytic. However, back in 1994 when the Internet was still new, what Rasmus Lerdorf did with his PHP visitor counter was important and new to Web site development. Lerdorf's PHP would go on to become a very, very powerful and popular web development language. PHP is a rich language for dynamic web development, it has many commands and functions that can perform many different site operations.

PHP is now known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. So what does that mouthful mean? The official PHP Web site (php.net) defines PHP this way;

You've heard that the plumber's house leaks right? Well, let's say there was this guy I know, yeah that's it; not me, mind you, but this guy I know really well, we went to high school together. This guy does things that you or I would never do. Things like editing live webpages onscreen rather than testing them first and then uploading the finished, working product.

One of the most welcome developments in web editing for hypertext markup language (or HTML) has been the move to separate content from presentation. This is valuable because the specs for projecting to a 30' screen for a large audience are different enough from the specs for presenting the same webpage on a 17" monitor, that one size just doesn't fit all.

Erik Meyer[1] is one of the web geniuses who has helped the web to "grow up" in the way information (content) is rendered or presented in multiple formats. These different formats are accomplished through collecting all the formatting codes that used to be repeated throughout your website into one place, a document called a style sheet. A key reason this is valuable is because your pages will load faster. Delays in rendering pages (because the code is not 'clean' or 'efficient') are directly traceable to lost sales.[2]