Newbie...What is PHP capable of?

[Squintz]

Im interested in being able to customize my own web forum much like the one your using right now...I notice that it has a PHP extention....Am i on the right track or should i be trying to learn something else...

If im on the right track are there any Forum scripts out that i can just edit....

My main concern is to be able to offer Domain name forums to customers who i am making web sites for....

I would also like to be able to customize and add smiley's...

Any information will help a ton...

[mordred]

Hello and welcome to the PHP world. Basically answering your initial question, PHP is a server-side scripting language capable of doing a load of things. All the usual stuff done by other languages running on the server like manipulating files, operating on user submitted data, XML processing, database queries, creating images is also possible with PHP. And a lot more - if there wasn't the very very good manual I would already be lost in the abundance of extensions, which provide added functionality to the PHP engine.

If you're interested in a little advocacy for PHP, check out this blog:
http://php.weblogs.com/

As for your second question: I understand it in a way that you would like to have a free forum software scripted in PHP, which should be easy to customize to your needs. There a plethora of forum scripts circling around, my advice would be to check out phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com). I have no personal experience with it, but a friend of mine who has no programming skills managed to install and customize it quite easily, so I guess it's not that much a hard task.

Although, for editing it's always useful to get a little in touch with PHP so you know what you're acutally doing. :)

[firepages]

Hi - cant really add to mordred's coverage except to suggest that you look at www.invisionboard.com which is a very sweet full-featured board if not that easy to hack - , install is also very painless.

[uranusalien]

PHP is capable of:


Connecting to IRC Servers and doing stuff
Manipulating Images
Printing using real printers on windows systems
Manipulating PDF Files.
and a lot lot more...