Had no choice but to begin learning, so Hello!

[dannypritchett01]

Hello All,

I had no interest in ever learning PHP. I took computer programming in school for fun because I was always a computer nerd. In 1995 at only 8 years old I began working on computers and repairing them. I had a Tandy 1000 running Dos, an older Apple PC that took 5.25 Floppies for Games, A Macintosh which I hated. And a pc with windows 3.1 up until the bug finally got me. Once I got a machine with Windows 95, I was hooked. I started tearing down machines, repairing and replacing parts, and setting them back up. I charged friends and family $35. It wasn't long before word got out that a kid was doing this work for fun, and everyone began telling a friend of a friend. Before I knew it after homework everyday I was working on someone's computer. As time passed, parts got better, operating systems improved some (Minus Windows ME & Vista), and I continued to get business. I finally got into computer programming for visual basic, next I was taking c++, but then I got tired of school and quit. I had found another way to bring in money, and had started doing that too. Fast forward many years and I got tired of the pc work. So I decided to stop and only work on stuff I wanted too, as I felt like it. Usually my own, or a close friend if I felt like I wanted to take on the stress. I ended up building a website on html and then eventually, switched to an auction script. Then decided I was tired of that and moved onto a PayPal ecommerce platform. That's when php introduced itself to me. I finally got tired of that and moved onto a different one that  I could add and improve too. I still am working on it today. I have been slowly been learning here and there how to add, change, and fix errors that have come up along the way. But in 2014 I injured my back for the second time. This time it caused memory loss. I have a hard time staying focused and have to take several breaks. I still work on my own site, but I am not able to remember the stuff I used to be able to do. So now I have to reach out for help. I have been working on an error a while now and came across this website. So I am happy to join the family, and maybe it will bring back some of my memory so I can go back to being myself and enjoying my life once again as a programmer.

Danny

[gizmola]

PHP is a very different language from the one you learned many years ago.  

Any code you might have written is entirely obsolete, and probably you are running a PHP version that long ago was end of life.

Candidly, PHP wasn't looking pretty viable, but in the last decade it has been steadily improved to once again be one of the best languages for web development.

It has an excellent dependency manager: Composer.  This enabled the creation of a truly impressive array of component libraries, many of which have great code coverage and unit tests, insuring quality and stability.

It has two state of the art Dependency Injection frameworks: Symfony and Laravel, and there are others that are capable.

There are several ORM's for relational database development supporting both the Data Mapper pattern or Active Record.

The language has been enhanced to support many of the constructs and type of coding available in other languages, and performance has been improved in a variety of ways, so that large commercial websites are comfortable using it.

It's once again a great time to be a PHP developer, but it's also a time to update your application and your knowledge.  I would highly recommend learning either Symfony 5.2 or Laravel, by porting your application to them.  In the process you will update your skills and at the same time, have a website that is clean, secure, maintainable and with your code concentrated on functionality rather than the basic MVC code most websites utilize.