Book Image

The PHP Workshop

By : Jordi Martinez, Alexandru Busuioc, David Carr, Markus Gray, Vijay Joshi, Mark McCollum, Bart McLeod, M A Hossain Tonu
Book Image

The PHP Workshop

By: Jordi Martinez, Alexandru Busuioc, David Carr, Markus Gray, Vijay Joshi, Mark McCollum, Bart McLeod, M A Hossain Tonu

Overview of this book

Do you want to build your own websites, but have never really been confident enough to turn your ideas into real projects? If your web development skills are a bit rusty, or if you've simply never programmed before, The PHP Workshop will show you how to build dynamic websites using PHP with the help of engaging examples and challenging activities. This PHP tutorial starts with an introduction to PHP, getting you set up with a productive development environment. You will write, execute, and troubleshoot your first PHP script using a built-in templating engine and server. Next, you'll learn about variables and data types, and see how conditions and loops help control the flow of a PHP program. Progressing through the chapters, you'll use HTTP methods to turn your PHP scripts into web apps, persist data by connecting to an external database, handle application errors, and improve functionality by using third-party packages. By the end of this Workshop, you'll be well-versed in web application development, and have the knowledge and skills to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with PHP.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

6. Using HTTP

Activity 6.1: Creating a Support Contact Form

Solution

  1. The first thing that pops out is the login handling difference since we now have to authenticate random users, not just a single one. So, we will need a method to fetch the user data for the username that is being logged in. The method will return user data for the existing user (using the level and password hashes), or NULL if the user is not found. Since we will learn about databases in the next chapter, we will store the available user list in code, in the same way as the previous exercise:

    Login.php

    37 private function getUserData(string $username): ?array
    38 {
    39     $users = [
    40         'vip' => [
    41             'level' => 'VIP',
    42             'password...