Category: theory

Create a valid HTML 5 template using PHP Includes

This is an old video I posted many years ago to my own web site. It is – I believe – the most popular post I have ever created. At last count, the video has over twenty-five thousand hits. I had the step-by-step written tutorial on my site back then and I lost track of how many times it was the most popular thing on my web site each month.

This is a beginner’s tutorial on how to create a valid HTML 5 template that uses PHP includes (“require” actually) that assembles the code on the server. This gives designers the opportunity to build a theme (or “skin”) that can manage the look of an entire web site – large or small.

This type of coding is a stepping-stone exercise in between coding HTML by hand and having a fully dynamic database-driven site, such as WordPress, or a custom content management system (“CMS”).

Enjoy.

Installing & Configuring the LAMP Virtualbox web server

Note

The screenshots in this tutorial were created on both an iMac (macOS 10.13.6) and a Ubuntu 18.04 Linux machine. When you configuring your instance of Virtualbox the appearance of the interface and the location of some controls may be different. The functionality remains the same on every platform (macOS, Windows or Linux).

Case-sensitivity

Please note that Linux is a case-sensitive filesystem. This means that “file.html” and “File.html” (different capitalization of the letter F) are understood by the computer as two different files!

So, in web design, please standardize your file or folder naming to:

  1. lowercase letter and/or numbers only
  2. periods reserved for use as the last character before the file name extension ex: .html, .css, etc.
  3. no spaces in file/folder names

Continue reading “Installing & Configuring the LAMP Virtualbox web server”