PHP/MySQL Web Development Using Dreamweaver

Going further

Thanks for being with us today and please give us feedback on this course by filling out our online form.

So what else is there is to know about building PHP/MySQL applications with Dreamweaver? A lot! The talented folks at Macromedia have managed to recast many of the actions you will want your application to perform into their "server behaviors" and we didn't have time to cover them all in this half-day class.

We recommend the following books to continue honing your new Dreamweaver skills:

PHP Web Development with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 (Paperback). Rachel Andrew, Allan Kent, David Powers.

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 with ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP : Training from the Source (Training from the Source) (Paperback). Jeffrey Bardzell.

Except for the final exercise we managed to stay away from code view completely, yet not looking at or understanding the the PHP code can place limits what you can do. PHP is an extensive programming language and taking the time to learn its fundamentals may be a good investment of your time if you will develop extensively with PHP and Dreamweaver. The sample site behind this link was developed using many of Dreamweaver's behaviors, but also with liberal use of custom PHP code as needed. It contains an enhancement of Dreamweaver's standard user authentication by doing a one-way encryption of stored password and security answers to avoid storing this sensitive data in plain text in the MySQL database. A download of the entire site, including the database definition and sample data, can be found here.

For more information about PHP see the official site at http://www.php.net, which includes extensive documentation.

For an intro to programming in PHP, see Learning PHP 5 (Paperback). David Sklar.

Finally if you are working for a Princeton University department, program, or center and have want to move beyond OIT's Webscript server which is for learning purposes only use this request form to obtain accounts on our WebLamp production and development servers.

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This guide was produced using the following software.

Author:
David L. Herrington
Associate Director of Academic Services
Office of Information Technology
Princeton University
February 2006

Last updated: 02/21/2006 9:24 AM
©2006. The Trustees of Princeton University.