PHP / MySQL Overview

in this short tutorial, I'll show you how to create a database, setup the fields, connect to it using PHP, insert data from an HTML form, and display all results to the screen.

not going to go into great detail and spend a lot of time explaining each little part of this... so if you have questions along the way do not hesitate to ask... but now, lets get right too it.

Before you do anything you need to create a MySQL database.

Login to Cpanel and create a new MYSQL database. We'll call it phonebook.

next create a MySQL user, and assign a password. I'll use dbuser as the username and 12345 as the password.

Next we need to grant all privileges for our newly created dbuser to work on the phonebook database we created.


As you may be aware, Cpanel prefixes all database names and usernames with the cpanel username. So our Database name is now: username_phonebook and username_dbuser

*note the username prefix will be your cpanel login username.

Alright, so now we're all setup. Lets write some PHP to connect to the database and try inserting, selecting, updating data.


First off, we need to connect. Localhost is used when PHP and MySQL are installed on the same server. Some hosts may provide a domain name or IP address to use here instead of localhost. So if localhost doesnt work for you, ask your host.
now we have only connected to MySQL, we have not yet chosen a database to work on, so lets do that.

So now when you save this file and check it out in your browser you should see the 2 successful messages. If you see a MySQL error that means you have made a small mistake somewhere. Dont worry, thats going to happen go over your code and make sure your username, database name and password is all correct.

before we can insert or select any data from the database we need to setup "tables" to hold our information. In this example we'll create a small phone book which will have 3 fields, ID, NAME, and PHONE. So lets go back to Cpanel and open phpmyadmin, once opened, click on your 'phonebook' link on the left hand side.

Near the center of your screen you'll see something like: Create new table on database phonebook

enter contacts as the name, and 3 as the number of fields. Then hit GO

now its time to steup the fields for our contacts table.

You should see 3 sets of form fields now. The first thing to enter is the name of the field, our first will be id, change VARCHAR to INT (this will allow numeric entries only). Next, under 'extra' set this to 'auto increment'. Finally click the radio button beside the small key icon. This will make this numeric ID field the primary key for all records in this database. This will make querying our database faster and easier later.

in the second group of form fields we want to name the field name leave it as VARCHAR and in the Length/Values field enter 150

in the third group of form fields we want to name the field phone also leave it as VARCHAR and in the Length/Values field enter 50

Screenshot attached>>>



Now we are ready to insert some data..

Here is a basic HTML form

Prefect, now all we need is some PHP to take the values in the HTML form and add them to the fields in our database table.


Now using this form you can add as many entries into your phonebook as you like.



so now we know how to add data to our database, how about showing the data we have added.

So there you have it, a quick and dirty way to add data to a mysql database and then select the results for outputting to the screen.

Some of the finer nuances have been left out for sake of keeping this tutorial short, but rest assured you will need to validate all the POST variables to secure your script, this is a topic for the near future or you can google PHP form validation, there have been plenty of write ups about this very important topic.

Attached Thumbnails