Specific php question

Question

I am fairly new to creating websites and I have done a website that I did in a sandbox server on my personal computer, it works brilliantly, but as soon as I try to put it on my companies server to go up on the internet it doesn't work anymore. What the site does is it takes fields from an html form and then does a sql search of a database that I set up and works fine. Then after the user is done with the form they hit submit and the sql is run and results are returned to the same page. The form action="" and then the results are returned. I am not sure if the companies server has php installed, but I don't know if that would be a problem or not because the browser should still be able to display the php code. I have no problems with the html form, it is just when I hit submit that the page is returned and nothing is displayed.

Any help is welcome.

Answer 1

"I am not sure if the companies server has php installed, but I don't know if that would be a problem"

It is. Browsers can do nothing with PHP. Maybe you shoud register for a free hosting provider and learn the basics of hosting there.

Answer 2

First you have to be sure that server has PHP installed.
make a file named phpinfo.php with this line

<?php phpinfo() ?>

and call it.
If it won't print out PHP config, you have to install PHP first.
Otherwise the problem most likely in the form of PHP tags, and you are using <? instead of <?php.
To solve, you can either change tags or set short_open_tag to on in the php.ini

Answer 3

PHP is a server-side language (i.e., it runs on the server, not the user's machine). Therefore, it must be installed on the company's server for any PHP code to execute properly. Browsers cannot interpret PHP code, and moreover PHP code is executed before the browser even receives any information (PHP: Hypertext Pre-Processor). Check that the server has PHP installed before you continue. (Also be aware of versions and features. For example, to use many new PHP features your server must be running PHP5.)

If you find that PHP is installed: Check your PHP syntax; make sure that no headers are sent after text is sent to the page; and make sure that there are no loops or anything in your code that could cause the script to continuously run without printing to the page.

Also, since your page is returned when you hit 'Submit,' but no new information is shown, make sure that there is not a problem with the MySQL configuration (e.g., incorrect password, query syntax, etc).

Answer 4

According to your comment

when I hit submit that the page is returned and nothing is displayed

I am going to make an assumption that you are getting a blank page. If that is correct, then I am also going to follow that up with the assumption that PHP is installed, there is an error in your script (my guess is the database connection), and that the error is not being displayed.

Add these lines to the top of your page and post back with the result:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', '1');

Answer 5

Okay thanks for the info guys, like I said I am new at real web development, also my company insisted on ms-access not MySQL, which I struggled with and got to work on my own server. My gut is telling me that php is not installed on the server because I have echos and they don't show up either. So I will try the phpinfo and see what happens to confirm my belief that php is not installed because they have only ever used html, css, and javascript.