Other Media (PHP) + Quiz

DUE Tuesday, Mar 27 – 4 points
(Wednesday NOON deadline)

WordPress is written in PHP, and some of the changes you will want to make to your themes will require at least a general understanding of PHP. For this assignment we will be introduced to some of the basics.

  • PHP: Essential Training at lynda.com
    This full video series walks you through everything you need to know to write PHP and connect to a MySQL database. We’ll be watching just a few of the short videos that are available as free samples. (Kevin is working on his own local computer, which is set up as a PHP server. To follow along, you’ll need to put these files on your web server instead of on your local computer. You can do this by creating the files on your local computer and uploading them to your web server through an FTP client.)

    • 1. > What is PHP? (2:56)
    • 4. > Embedding PHP (0:44 – 6:55)
    • 4. > “Hello world!” (5:20)
    • 4. > The operational trail (1:36)
    • 5. > Variables (9:05)

  • Using the PHP Include Function to Template Faster
    This tutorial walks you through how to use separate PHP files for certain sections of HTML to make maintaining a web site simpler. (We’ll be covering this technique in class and using it to make a third version of everyone’s favorite Mythology article for an assignment.) WordPress themes use this technique on a much larger scale than this simple tutorial, so getting a grasp on this should help you grasp how give you a better idea of how WordPress themes work: we’ll be looking at all the include files in a WordPress theme in the second Other Media + Quiz assignment this week.

Once you have read or watched these materials, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you full credit.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author of the material … ”:

  1. T/F? All PHP code is written between <?php and ?> tags.
  2. T/F? The echo function simply outputs the content to the browser.
  3. T/F? Each PHP instruction must end with a semicolon.
  4. T/F? All variable names in PHP start with a dollar sign $.
  5. T/F? PHP variable names are not case sensitive: $a is exactly the same as $A.
  6. T/F? PHP is a client-side scripting language.
  7. T/F? PHP needs to be compiled.
  8. T/F? PHP files typically have a .php extension to the file name.
  9. T/F? PHP is an alternative to HTML: you will use one or the other in any given web page, not both simultaneously.
  10. T/F? All PHP code is written between <% and %> tags.
  11. T/F? Whitespace is not significant in PHP: tabs, double-spaces, and line returns can be used to make the code readable without affecting how the code works.
  12. T/F? CTRL+S is a keyboard shortcut on Windows for saving a file.
  13. T/F? If you view the source of a PHP file in the browser, you will be able to see the PHP code.
  14. T/F? To concatenate two strings in PHP, you put a plus sign (+) in between them.
  15. T/F? A variable is a symbolic representation of a value.
  16. T/F? Writing a variable name with each word capitalized — $myVariableName — is known as “mountain-range case.”
  17. T/F? Kevin prefers to separate words in his variable names using hyphens.
  18. T/F? To assign a value to a variable in PHP, you use a colon — $var1 : 10;
  19. T/F? The include function allows multiple pages to load the same blocks of code or common elements.
  20. T/F? In the example Zach Dunn provides, adding the PHP include() function reduced his PHP file down from 29 lines to 8 lines.

DUE Tuesday, Mar 27 – 4 points
(Wednesday NOON deadline)