Portfolio
You're looking at the portfolio of Liudger Wijbenga. I invite you to leave behind your thoughts, questions or remarks, it's greatly appreciated!
Previous version of liud.nl (second portfolio website)
Due to the massive amount of knowledge, tricks and know-how I gathered during developing this website, it naturally deserves a mention in my portfolio.
I increased my skills in the fields of Javascript, XHTML and CSS, and I increased my skills notably in the fields of PHP and MySQL while developing the site.
The main purpose while developing the site was to increase my knowledge significantly in the field of dynamically, interactive websites. In fact, the page you are looking at right now is generated dynamically.
Dynamical generation means you don't hardcode every page you have on your site, but dependent on the arguments supplied by the user (in this case the id of the portfolio article, pid), you fetch data from a database. But that's not all there is to it. The data has to be presented back to user, in a fashionable way.
That's were PHP comes to the rescue. It sort of acts like the negotiator between your browser and the database(MySQL). The negotiator fetches the data you requested, stylizes it in a pretty manner, and presents it to you in your browser.
But there is more to it than just the frontend of the site, the part you are using right now. If there is data to be added to the website, it has to be stored in the database. Likewise, if there's inappropriate content placed by a user, there has to be a way to remove it from the database again. Welcome to the world of Content Management Systems, in it's abbreviated form it's CMS. The role of PHP within the CMS, that usually consists of forms that can be filled in (and buttons that can be pressed), is to get the data from the users browser when he presses the 'submit' button, process it for possible errors and mistakes, format the data so that it is in a format suitable for the database, and then actually add the data into the database, and make sure the right cabinets are used.
I developed both the frontend, as well as the backend of this site, and learned lots of do's and don'ts in the process.
