PHP is a powerful open source server-sided scripting language that can be used on a wide variety of operating systems and webservers, including Apache on UNIX and IIS on Windows.
PHP contains numerous extensions which enable you to dynamically create images and flash files, parse xml, connect to remote servers using pop, imap, ftp, http and raw sockets, natively access many database servers including PostgreSql, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server, compress and decompress files, lookup domain names and and much more.
PHP has an excellent manual and online documentation which covers every function for every extension available.
I run a number of web servers with PHP and MySQL and have a PHP command line script that runs on a daily basis to back up MySQL databases using the mysqldump command. It would be possible to do this using a simple bash script as well, and I know I used to use a bash script in the past but for some reason switched it to PHP at some stage.
It is possible to trigger an error in PHP. This can be useful for debugging purposes, or if there is some condition which occurs in your PHP script which requires a PHP notice, warning or full error which causes the script to halt execution, and which would not be generated by PHP itself.
PHP has a really useful date() function for formatting dates from timestamps. When used in conjunction with strtotime() you can do some really quick and easy manipulation and formatting of dates.
The strtotime() function in PHP allows you to convert English text date time strings into UNIX timestamps. It is useful for converting database datetime strings into UNIX timestamps and also creating dates into the future or past based on the current time or relative to a date and time in the future or the past. This post looks at some examples of doing this.
The PHP function array_unique() allows you to create a new array which contains only the unique values from the original array. This post looks at some examples of using the array_unique function.
phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL using a web browser and is one of the most active projects on Sourceforge.
