How to make a dynamic PHP page

Learn how to create dynamic php pages with an example. See how to use variables and loops to generate content for your page.

Creating a Dynamic PHP Page

Creating a dynamic page with PHP is an effective way to build webpages that are interactive and engaging. With PHP, you can easily create a page that can pull data from a database and display it in an organized fashion. In this tutorial, we will discuss the basics of creating a dynamic page with PHP.

Getting Started

To begin, you'll need to create a file with the .php extension. This will be the main file for your dynamic page. Open up your favorite text editor, and create a new file with the name index.php.

Writing the HTML Structure

Now we need to write the basic HTML structure for our page. Inside the index.php file, add the following code:


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Dynamic Page</title>
</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

This will create the basic HTML structure for our page. Now that we have the structure, we can start adding content.

Adding PHP

Now we can start adding the PHP code that will make our page dynamic. We will be using the PHP MySQLi Library to connect to a database and retrieve the data. At the top of the page, add the following code to include the MySQLi Library and create a database connection:


<?php
// Include MySQLi Library
require_once('path/to/mysqli.php');

// Connect to the database
$mysqli = new mysqli('hostname', 'username', 'password', 'database_name');
?>

Once the connection has been established, we can start writing the code to retrieve the data from the database.

Retrieving Data from the Database

To retrieve data from the database, we will use the MySQLi query() method. This method will allow us to execute a SQL query and retrieve the results. For example, let's say we want to retrieve a list of products from a database table. We could use the following query:


$result = $mysqli->query('SELECT * FROM products');

This will execute a SQL query to select all of the records from the products table. The result of the query will be stored in the $result variable.

Displaying the Results

Now that we have retrieved the data from the database, we can display the results on the page. We can use a while loop to iterate over the results and create the HTML structure to display the data.


<ul>
<?php
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo '<li>' . $row['name'] . '</li>';
}
?>
</ul>

This code will loop through the results and create an unordered list of product names.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we discussed the basics of creating a dynamic page with PHP. We started by creating a basic HTML structure, then added the PHP code to connect to a database and retrieve the data. Finally, we used a while loop to iterate over the results and create the HTML structure to display the data. With a few lines of code, we were able to create a dynamic page with PHP.

php