The benefits of writting a website in PHP vs. plain HTML

In order to explain the main difference in choosing PHP over HTML I want you to imagine writing a letter. I want you to think hard and try to answer this simple question:

When was the last time you wrote a letter with a pen & paper?

I know some of us are still loyal to the old paper and pen, however with today's techonlogy it is much more convinent to write and edit a letter using a computer.

Why? Because a computer leaves room for you to dynamically update your file.

In essence, when you are creating a website that contains more than one page, and you want to use the same template for the pages (Example: facebook – millions of pages that look very similar), you want to break the page into peices, just like you have a header and a footer on your word document.

I think you would agree that writting the header and footer and page number on each pages of a 10 page paper would be a hassel. Now try to think what would happen if you had to do that for thousands of pages let alone millions of pages. That's right, it would be and endless job.

For our convince PHP was invented. And what it basically does is this: you create a template of how you cant your page to look. Then you create small files that represent each section in the page. Then you put the text that you want to be duplicated on all the pages (for example – site name, site footer, menu, slogan etc'.) and when you put it all together the website come up as a whole. Now lets say you have a website with 500 pages. If you were using plain HTML and you wanted to change the slogan you would have to physically go into each page and update each HTML file. However, with PHP if you want to change the slogan text all you have to do is just go into 1 file for example: "slogan.tpl" and change the slogan only once. This way, once you changed the slogan in that 1 file it will automatically change the slogan on all of the site pages.

Pretty cool right?

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