Chapter 43. Developing a Weblog with PHP
Small standalone PHP applications, such as polls and e-mail forms, are all very useful, but complete content sites are where PHP really shines. Here we give complete instructions for developing the simplest type of standalone site, which is the weblog.
Why Weblogs?
A weblog is the simplest kind of dynamic site. It can be thought of as a dynamic version of the personal home page: a content site organized by chronology with frequently updated posts. Most weblogs do not create all their own content in the sense of writing full news stories or producing a trove of artwork; they instead exist to comment on other people's content and events of the day or to provide a venue for personal thoughts and reflections. On the high end of the genre, public weblogs like Slashdot can become extremely popular meeting places for online communities to chew the fat of their common interests.
If you are a newcomer to server-side scripting, we encourage you to immediately start a personal weblog as your first major project. Nothing helps you learn faster than running an actual complete site of your own, where you can try out a range of new techniques and ideas in context. Especially because PHP and other open source technologies grow and change so quickly, it's well-nigh essential to have a preexisting testbed always available to doodle around on.
Weblogs are also just ...
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