Since I needed a secure environment, I needed to install PHP manualy (rather than with the MSI). I downloaded PHP and started following the instructions on php.net. The documentation wasn’t bad but seemed a bit more complicated than it needed to be.

As I was clicking from one page to the next I noticed a comment at the bottom of the page from someone named Paul Lynch who said he wrote a simple set of instructions. Curiosity, and the promise of simplicity, got the best of me so I followed the link.

I couldn’t be happier with my decision. Paul’s tutorial is simple, informative and to the point. I finished up the installation and had a test page working in less than 10 minutes.

For anyone looking for a PHP installation guide, I highly recommend checking out Paul’s tutorial.

-rG

$path = ‘images/thumbs’;
$folder = dir($path);
while($img=$folder->read()) {
if($img== “.” || $img== “..”) continue;
echo ‘
<div id=”imgPod”>

<div id=”image”>
<a href=”images/’.$img.’” <img src=”‘.”$path/$img”.’” /></a>

</div>

</div>’;
}

The sorting worked like a charm on my host but when I published it live the images were scrambled. Turns out Linux doesn’t read the files in alphabetical order. What I had to do instead was to first read the filenames into an array, then sort the array and display the images in the order of the newly sorted array. The new code:

$path = ‘images/thumbs’;
$folder = dir($path);
$img_array = array();
while($img=$folder->read()) {
if($img== “.” || $img== “..”) continue;
$img_array[] = $img;
}

sort($img_array);
foreach ($img_array as $image) {echo ‘
<div id=”imgPod”>

<div id=”image”>
<a href=”images/’.$image.’” <img src=”‘.”$path/$image”.’” /></a>

</div>

</div>’;
}

Not much extra coding and it worked great.

The following snippet looks for a URL parameter named page. If no parameter was passed, the page will reload with a page parameter of page1:

<?php
if (isset($_GET['page'])) {
$pathToPage = sprintf(“%s%s.php”, ‘myfolder/’,$_GET['page']);
} else {
echo ‘<script>location.href=”template.php?pg=page1″;</script>’ ;
}
?>

Since it’s part of the example I should mention that sprintf is a fantastic substitution function that makes life a lot easier. In my example it is substituting the instances of %s with a folder name and a page name read from a URL parameter named page. For example, if the value of page was ‘page2′, the resulting string would be: ‘myfolder/page2.php’. Pretty slick!