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The web development environment for our tutorials will be kept as simple as possible. It is important that you understand the practical concepts of the lessons, rather than the details of the complete solution. The documents used in these tutorials will be well defined and the applications configured for our training purposes. Let's begin by looking at the web code used throughout these tutorials. Because we're dealing primarily with web development, you should be familiar with the code that makes web publishing work. Here's a sample of web code that you may be editing at any given lesson. This sample code contains PHP code, HTML or XHTML code, some form of cascading file sheet or style sheet inclusion and some JavaScript. You should be very familiar with the bottom three. A working knowledge of them would be ideal to get the most out of this training. Don't worry about the PHP code. You will be learning that in the following lessons. Now let's talk a little bit about the applications that we'll be using during our training. Here's the new FileMaker Server 9 admin console. When I click over on the databases in the sidebar, we see that the FM server sample file is hosted already as part of the installation. This file has been configured for PHP publishing and can be used to test if PHP Publishing is enabled and functioning properly. To be sure that you have PHP publishing configured correctly, click the test page up at the top of the window. Then click on test PHP custom web publishing link near the bottom of the page. The web page should display a list of records from the hosted database file. This list was generated successfully using PHP. If you did not see a successful test page, review your FileMaker installation manual or contact FileMaker installation support. Our development file will be a modified version of the FileMaker asset management template, which ships with FileMaker Pro. We will be modifying this file as we go, so you'll want to upload the new version that is available for each lesson. Uploading files is easy in the Server 9 console. Simply click the upload database button and follow the procedures. Here I'm selecting the asset management template file. Finally I upload it and FileMaker Server 9, once you've uploaded a file; it automatically configures it for sharing and opens it up. You'll want to upload the asset management file for each tutorial that you move through because as the file changes, a new version will be available in each tutorial folder. We'll be modifying our FileMaker database using FileMaker Pro Advanced Version 9. You'll want to open the database from the server and not directly from the folder where it's located on the hard drive. Click on your local server or the server on your network and then open the asset management file. One thing that you'll want to make sure you do when you're working with PHP or custom web publishing and FileMaker Pro is make sure under your file options that you've set smart quotes to be disabled. Smart quotes are out of the range of normal ASCII characters or they're considered higher ASCII characters and sometimes they do not play well with HTML or PHP. We'll be using Text Wrangler as our code editor. Text Wrangler is made by Bare Bones Software and is available for free. There are many different code editors ranging from simple and free to expensive and complex and there is a large quantity in between. We've chosen Text Wrangler because it weighs in on the simple and free side of the scale. A couple of things to note about our code editing under the preferences of Text Wrangler. One is under the editor defaults, we will have auto expand tabs enabled. What this will do is cause our tab key on the keyboard to place a certain amount of spaces, rather than the tab character. The amount of spaces is determined below, four spaced per tab by default. The reason for doing this is that tab characters can be rendered differently or displayed differently when your file is opened in different editors. To keep things simple, it's easier to just use auto expand tabs and have spaces represent tabs. Under the languages, we're going to go ahead and set PHP as the default language. This will give us our code coloring immediately, as soon as we create a new page. Lastly, we're going to be using our web browser. There's nothing special about the web browser that you need to know, except one item in Internet Explorer on the PC. If you're using Internet Explorer, you'll want to make sure that you have any sort of page caching mechanism disabled. You don't want to be viewing the cached version of PHP pages. PHP is a dynamic language. You want to make sure that you're requesting a new version of the page to be rendered each time you're viewing it. So make sure you go through the options in your version of Internet Explorer and disable any page caching. This concludes an overview of our development environment. You're now ready to begin learning PHP.