48Part IPHP: The BasicsThose coming to PHP from (Shared web hosting)
48Part IPHP: The BasicsThose coming to PHP from a strictly client-side perspective probably have the hardest adjust- ment to make. There s no such thing as a plush development environment with wizards anddrag-and-drop icons and built-in graphics manipulation. If that sort of thing is important toyou, you can use a WYSIWYG editor to format the page and then add PHP functionality laterusing a text editor. The downside of this strategy is, of course, that machine-written code isoften not very human-readable but one must suffer to be pretty. The last year and a half, however, has seen substantial change in the market. Plenty of editorsfor both Windows and Linux now offer at least syntax highlighting for PHP. Several of thesecan map drive locations to server names so you can debug in place. Even the WYSIWIGDreamweaver now claims some degree of PHP support. It still can t write the code for you, and you probably wouldn t want that if it could but it won t change your code either. Be particularly careful with using Microsoft FrontPage as a PHP editor, as it seems to causeproblems for many users. At a minimum, you will need to enable (by choosing the option inyour php.inifile) and use ASP-style tags; or use JavaScript-style