Hello!

[MeOnTheWeb]

Wow - that was incredibly easy to join! NO hoops to go through, giving up your first born (or second, or even third).

So I'm an old-time PHP programmer, but over the last 12-years left IT and have been working as a senior manager in Customer Operations. Love what I do, but really miss programming. After some research I've come upon a niche project that I think I can do better (than the few other companies in town that develop similar systems) and am now re-learning PHP, MySQL, JAVA, JavaScript... it's not easy! It took me the better part of 6-hours to create a simple form, do basic validation on it and write the contents to a MySQL DB. Jeez!!! Talk about rusty wheels.

How basis is the form... check it out. 

Anyway I joined a couple of FB PHP groups ... and ... well, lets just say, I don't know if I will learn anything there so searched out PHP forums -- where I initially got my start and learned a lot from. Wish I could remember those early forums I was on, I learned so much from the professionals that I developed my first SaaS APP which was a page generator. This was at a time when you could game Google results easily. I developed the app, set-up my own dedicated server and sold subscriptions to it. It was successful - but of course this was around the time I moved into Customer Operations (and left IT). Wound down the app and focused on the job.

Now here I am, 12-years later relearning and building as I go. 

Edited May 26, 2018 by MeOnTheWeb

[Barand]

PHP has seen quite a few significant changes over those 12 years that you've been away, so keep the manual handy. I recommend you read through the changes in each new version's release notes so get an idea of what has changed. Same goes for HTML too.

Welcome to the forums. And, yes, we like to get people in before demanding the sacrifice of family members :).

[gizmola]

I would go one further and strongly advise that you use either Symfony or Laravel framework.  Along the way you will learn about component libraries and the Composer tool.  This has been revolutionary for the PHP development platform.  

This presentation was back in 2012, but it really lays out the reasoning behind why PHP needed composer and also explains how things got much better for the PHP community once it was created.  Of course PHP Namespacing was a key improvement that helped facilitate this, along with the PHP framework integration group that has been creating and publishing standards to keep the PHP community moving forward with relevant and competitive technology.