Chapter 31. Creating Dynamic Websites

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using PHP

• Setting Up an Interactive Site with WordPress

• Setting Up a Web-Based Community Forum

Websites that remain stagnant and don't change will most likely suffer and lose traffic. See it once and you never have to go back. Give a user a reason to come back news, community, downloading, commentary and not only will one person keep coming back, her friends will visit, too. You'll get links from other places, and then Google finds you faster. It's a simple formula.

You could manually code large chunks of the site every day, but a far easier solution is to use PHP, the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, to easily create and maintain lively, interactive sites that people will want to visit regularly. Some 20 million domains use PHP to generate their sites, and the number increases nearly every month.

In Chapter 14, "Creating Basic Websites" you created a basic static website with tools included in SUSE Linux. In this chapter, you'll learn how to use PHP to make that site more interactive and appealing. Then you'll let your users talk among themselves with a forum.