In this tutorial we assume that your web server has activated support for PHP and that all files ending in .php are handled by PHP.
If your server supports PHP, then you do not need to do anything. Just create your .php files, put them in your web directory and the server will automatically parse them for you. There is no need to compile anything nor do you need to install any extra tools. Think of these PHP-enabled files as simple HTML files with a whole new family of magical tags that let you do all sorts of things.
Let us say you want to save precious bandwidth and develop locally. In this case, you will want to install a web server, such as » Apache, and of course » PHP. You will most likely want to install a database as well, such as » MySQL.
You can either install these individually or choose a simpler way. If you have problems with installing PHP yourself, we would suggest you ask your questions on our » installation mailing list.
