Can you use PHP to create a new html page?

[drew22299]

I want to create a login page for users, once they have created a screen name and entered their details, is it possible to transfer the details they entered to a profile page which is automatically created with the screen name they entered as the url after the website name?

for example

www.sitename.com/screenname

[Chikenty]

are u talkin about a directory or a .php file...if its a php file if i am correct yea it would be /screename but it would be /screename.php?id=32235 .... i think thats right but wait til u get some pro. help

[drew22299]

Thanks, your answer is still useful,

would it need to be a directory if it was to store a photo of the user and other information in the profile?

how would i be able to implement it such that when a user registers it will create a blank php profile page?

[karlkatzke]

OK, step 1: Let's clarify what PHP does.

PHP is a programming language that specializes in producing web pages... but you can produce anything, from VCards (to use a previous example from today) to .XLS files to PDF files to HTML files. In simple terms, this means that you can pass the program variables, and it executes program logic to output a display format.

PHP doesn't create an HTML file (although it -can- save a file), it simply displays HTML to the user. You don't have to have PHP save an HTML file for the file to be visible to an end-user, it only has to output HTML.

In your case, you want a user to enter data into some displayed HTML in their browser, then you want that form to submit to a particular page and do something like create a new row in a database, and then you want to redirect the user to another page that displays and allows them to change their profile information. Nowhere in there do we actually need to create an HTML file, we just need to *display* html.

Step 2: The short URLS

Google 'mod_rewrite' -- there's an apache module that will allow you to rewrite

sitename.com/foobar
into
sitename.com/user_profile.php?id=foobar

So the user enters sitename.com/foobar and then your web server sees it as user_profile.php?id=foobar ... this is how Wordpress and other blogging software creates the short access names.

Life gets much easier if you're not writing and trying to maintain the state of dynamic content with static files. Static files suck.