Pay attention to the errors!

[Lazlo90]

I'll admit that I'm NOT a php expert, however I have learned a thing or two after messing around with several php scripts.

One of the things I've learned is that when I get an error msg. I should take note of what line it is referring to, and try to see if I have made any recent modifications to either that line or another file that might be associated with it.

If you're new to php I recommend you keep this in mind as it will save you some headaches as sometimes the error can go away if you simply remove the offending issue in the line given, and minor errors often occur when you add in an extra character or don't escape the line properly.

I hope this helps someone as it sure helped me

[bluetrance05]

That is right, a beginner should watch out for errors when checking the coded page script of the site, otherwise it would not look good in a remote browser. I used to train myself with a "trial-and-error" method on handling the php script in my site so basically it will show me the outcome of the page that I've created.

[Lazlo90]

Yeah I learned like that as well, however it's best to do that in a demo site as I've often messed around with the code on a live site, and it resulted in some users temporarily getting some error messages which was obviously not good. Plus if you really mess up, your site will have those errors until you fix them. But if it's a demo site, you can play around with it all you want as it doesn't affect your real traffic.

[php_rules]

Originally Posted by Lazlo90

Yeah I learned like that as well, however it's best to do that in a demo site as I've often messed around with the code on a live site, and it resulted in some users temporarily getting some error messages which was obviously not good. Plus if you really mess up, your site will have those errors until you fix them. But if it's a demo site, you can play around with it all you want as it doesn't affect your real traffic.

Agreed - I have an old computer (nothing much - its an old pentium 2 laptop with 128mb ram) that I use as a development box - I have setup linux on it with the same setup as my real host (same version of apache, php, etc) and have a couple of scrpts that I made to pull down my current code and put it in a directory on the development box once I have done all the testing and editing I run another script that makes a backup of the live website and then uploads the new one in its place (databases and all) - but YOU MUST REMEMBER TO KEEP BACKUPS OF ALL YOUR SITES this has saved my skin a good few times.