Build Your First Website From Scratch With PHP 8 Programming

Published on: 05 Feb 2021

Share on:

So you have decided to be a PHP developer and hopefully, you have our article about it. If not, please see some details about becoming a PHP developer and some great resources for learning PHP. Either way, you have some background knowledge about what you are going to do next, and let us proceed towards creating our first PHP website page.  Here you will find a step by step procedure for setting up your development environment and creating our page in PHP 8. Why PHP8? Let us see what it offers:

PHP-8 offers many new features over PHP-7. There are some of them given as following:

1- Union types

Union types are a set of two or more types that suggest that it is possible to use either one of these. 
public function SomeFunction(A|B $input): int|float;
Void can never be part of a union type because it indicates "no return value". nullable unions can be written either by using |null, or by the existing? notation:
public function SomeFunction (A|null $ input): void;

public function SomeFunction (?B $ input): void;    

2- Null-safe operator

With null-safe operator, we can now write our methods with null coalescing-like behaviour.
$appointmentDateAsString = $appointment->getStartDate()?->asDateTimeString();

3- Named arguments 

Named arguments allows us to pass in values to a function, by specifying the value name, so that we don't have to specify their order and we can also skip optional parameters
function SomeFunction(string $a, string $b, ?string $c = null, ?string $d = null) 
{ /* … */ }

SomeFunction (
    b: 'value b', 
    a: 'value a', 
    d: 'value d',
);

4- static return type

It was already possible to return self prior to PHP8, static wasn't a valid return type. 
Class Example : 

{
    public function test(): static
    {
        return new static();
    }
}

5- Match expression

Match is an operator which can return values and it :
•    doesn't require break statements, 
•    can combine conditions, 
•    uses strict type comparisons 
•    doesn't do any type of coercion.
It looks like this:

$matchresult = match($input) {
    0 => "hello",
    '1', '2', '3' => "world",
};

6- Constructor property promotion

Constructor property promotion is more of syntactic improvement to create value objects or data transfer objects. PHP can now combine them into one Instead of specifying class properties and a constructor.
Previously:

class Payment 
{
    public Currency $currency;
 
    public int $amt;
 
    public function __construct(
        Currency $currency,
        int $amt,
    ) {
        $this->currency = $currency;
        $this->amt= $amt;
    }
}
You can write as:
class Payment
{
    public function __construct(
        public Currency $currency,
        public int $amt,
    ) {}
}

7- New str_starts_with() and str_ends_with() functions 

Two new functions are now added in the core which were much awaited
str_starts_with('mystring', 'my'); // true
str_ends_with('mystring', 'string'); // true
There are several other improvements that you can go through in official PHP docs. You can’t memorize it all, so the best way to learn them to all is to use them somewhere. So let us start setting up our development environment and see how to create our first page in PHP8.

The Development Environment

Now that we know what to use, we need to create a development environment where we can write code and see results in the development process. We can download all of them manually and that is going to take a long time and many configurations. Many all in one package like XAMPP. When you install it, all the required components from the database to the server are installed and configured automatically and you are good to go with development.
You can choose all of them to install and configure manually but I think first we get the idea of how to create a website or an e-commerce website, precisely, then after that, there are a lot of resources over the internet where you can find all manual steps. Apart from that the automatic installation provides you with many answers like folder structure and which thing to put where in terms of configuration, so when you know this, you can experiment later on with manual configuration.
You can install XAMPP from apachefriends.org and the process is pretty straightforward. You just have to double click the downloaded installer file and the installer guides you through the process. So let us see how to install development environment components like apache server, MySQL, and PHP8 are installed on windows.
I won’t get into the step-by-step screenshots as understand that you are fairly advance to just click next for further steps but I will show you the important screens.
For example, when you get the following screen in the 2nd step when you start with the installation of XAMPP

 You see that all of the options from the database to language and mail server and even a fake mail (for testing mails) is selected. To install PHP 8, you don’t have to do anything specific as it is already selected. If you don’t want to install Perl, remove it otherwise keep all options ticked if you plan to learn Perl in the future, learning is never bad, right?
Now click next and you will go to the following folder selection screen. You can choose where you want to install, for most of the time default selection is perfectly good to go with.

 After this just keep clicking next until the installation is started. Wait for the installation to finish and if everything goes well you will see the following screen: 

Here you will see the option of opening the control panel checked. Keep it checked and click finish.
After this you will be asked about language, so you will select English (The US Flag) unless you prefer German. Upon selecting the language, you are presented with the following screen which is the control panel for each component of the development environment.

You can see the benefit here, you have all of the configurations in one place and you are good to go with development. You may face port-related issues in running the apache server here when you click the start button. The required port for apache might already be in use by programs like Skype. You just have to change the port number to the number which is not in use. So if the default port 80 is in use you can change it to 8080. For changing the port number, you just need to click on config and configure httpd.config file and change the port number in the “Listen” segment. The config button in the top right tells you about the ports currently in use and the programs using them.

The Database-Creating Database in MySql

Now that we have created the environment, we will start with our development of the e-commerce website. We will start with the database. The structure of the database must be clear before creating any applications. As of now, we have installed the My SQL along with our XAMPP installation but we need to create a database. With the XAMPP control panel, it is even easier. When Apache and MySql are started, they have highlighted something like the following, and the Admin button is highlighted as well.

For creating a database click on the Admin button of MySql and the PhpMyAdmin database explorer opens in your default web browser. So let us see how to use MySql through this Php MyAdmin interface: 

The interface is simple and you can create a new database by clicking the New button in the left sidebar. Suppose we create a database named “MyEShop”. 

So you put the name like the following image and click Create and the new database is created. You can see the new database like following:

 Now you can start creating tables by clicking the create table section. Just put the table name and click Go at far right.
Suppose we create a table named Products. It stores some items with price, image, description, etc of a product. This can be used in an e-commerce system, inventory system, and so on.

Start with Code in PHP8

Now that we have created the tables, we will need to write some code to connect with the database:
I have used Visual Studio Code. I like the VS Code because of it’s Git integration and Intellisense which helps writing code faster. You can choose your own.

First, we will create a PHP configuration file (config.php) where we can provide details for database connection configuration. Following is the code for config.php. Instead of writing all code in one file, we create different PHP file which is imported to other files depending upon usage. This helps maintaining the separation of concerns in our code and maintenance is easier. We don’t need to find the code to be modified in a sea of code lines. We can pick the specific PHP file and make changes to it if required. For example, if we need to change the database later for some reason or name or password, we will only make changes in Config.php.

/**************************  Config.php ***************************************/

   $DB_HOST = 'localhost'; 
   $DB_NAME = 'myeshop'; 
   $DB_USER = 'root'; 
   $DB_PASS = ''; 

include 'config.php';

class DB{
    public static $pdo;

    public static function connection(){
        if(!isset(self::$pdo)){
            try{
                self::$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host='.DB_HOST.'; dbname='.DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASS);
            } catch(PDOException $e){
                echo "Connection Failed";
            }
        }
        return self::$pdo;
    }

    public function prepared($sql){
        return self::connection()->prepare($sql);
    }

}

/************************  Product.php for create class *************************/
class Product{
    private $table = 'products';

public function readAll(){
    if(isset($_POST['filter']))
                {
                    $filter = $_POST['filter'];
                  $sql = "SELECT id, imgUrl, product, price,category FROM products where Product like ? or Description like ? or Category like ? ";
    }else{
    $sql = "SELECT id, imgUrl, product, price,category FROM products limit 6";
    }
        $stmt = DB::prepared($sql);
        $params = array("%$filter1%","%$filter2%","%$filter3%");
        $stmt->execute($params);
        $result = $stmt->fetchAll();

         if($stmt-> rowCount() > 0){
                         return $result;
         }
    }
}

**************** *************  index.php for view product  ************************/
  <?php $product = new Product();
    if(is_array($product->readAll()) || is_object($product->readAll()))
    { ?>
    <ul>
     <?php foreach($product->readAll() as $value){
        $i++;
        
        echo '<li>
        <div class="single-products">
        <div class="productinfo text-center">
            <a href="product-details.php?prodid='.$value['id'].'" rel="bookmark" title="'.$value['Product'].'">
                <img src="reservation/img/products/'.$value['imgUrl'].'" alt="'.$value['Product'].'" title="'.$value['Product'].'" width="150" height="150" /></a>
            </a>
  
                <h2><a href="product-details.php?prodid='.$value['id'].'" rel="bookmark" title="'.$value['Product'].'">'.$value['Product'].'</a></h2>
  <h2>$'.$row['Price'].'</h2>
  <p>Category: '.$row['Category'].'</p>
  
  <a href="product-details.php?prodid='.$value['id'].'" class="btn btn-default add-to-cart"><i class="fa fa-shopping-cart"></i>View Details</a>
  </div>  
        </li>';
                          
                     
            } ?>
      </ul>';
    <?php }?>