Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
15
PHP BASICS: THEMES AND
PLUG-INS
Introducing PHP
WordPress is written in the PHP scripting language, and, therefore,
much of what users contribute to the software in the way of themes and
plug-ins is written in the same language. In this chapter, you'll learn a
little bit about the language, along with its relationship to WordPress
and the MySQL database. You'll find out where PHP fits in with theme
creation. We conclude with writing WordPress plug-ins with PHP and
getting them into the WordPress Plugin Directory.
PHP is the result of another lazy programmer's effort to simplify his life.
Back in 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf wanted to eliminate some of the drudgery
associated with updating his personal web page. Lerdorf wrote some
Perl scripts to generate HTML tags based on some code programmed in
the C language. In June 1995, he announced the existence of the
Personal Home Page (PHP) tools, version 1.0, in a Usenet CGI news-
group. Those tools have since evolved into a full-fledged scripting lan-
guage with a powerful engine, Zend, and a large community of
developers hacking the code. You can read more about the history of
PHP at http://php.net/history.
