Chapter 1.  Create a User Profile System and use the Null Coalesce Operator

To begin this chapter, let's check out the new null coalesce in PHP 7. We'll also learn how to build a simple profiles page with listed users that you can click on, and create a simple CRUD-like system which will enable us to register new users to the system and delete users for banning purposes.

We'll learn to use the PHP 7 null coalesce operator so that we can show data if there is any, or just display a simple message if there isn't any.

Let's create a simple UserProfile class. The ability to create classes has been available since PHP 5.

A class in PHP starts with the word class, and the name of the class:

class UserProfile { 
 
  private $table = 'user_profiles'; 
  
} 
 
} 

We've made the table private and added a private variable, where we define which table it will be related to.

Let's add two functions, also known as a method, inside the class to simply fetch the data from the database:

function fetch_one($id) { 
  $link = mysqli_connect(''); 
  $query = "SELECT * from ". $this->table . " WHERE `id` =' " .  $id "'"; 
  $results = mysqli_query($link, $query); 
} 
 
function fetch_all() { 
  $link = mysqli_connect('127.0.0.1', 'root','apassword','my_dataabase' ); 
  $query = "SELECT * from ". $this->table . "; 
 $results = mysqli_query($link, $query); 
}