For the sake of it with things progressing further toward open-source, I've made the entire Insert Coin PHP source code (as of June 24, 2008) available for download.
http://www.4shared.com/file/52584333/d1386c3d/insert_coin_2008_6_24.html
In my relative hurry to get the site up and running, the commenting is sorely lacking, but that will progress with time and future updates made available.
I use two different freely available PHP utilities, on top of my own code:
-HTML Purifier
-phpThumb
And two freely available JavaScript utilities
-Prototype.js
-tinyMCE
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Very simple example:
<?php
$x = true;
if($x == true)
echo "<b>TRUE</b>";
else
echo "<i>FALSE</i>";
?>
The source actually includes PHP files, CSS files, JavaScript files, an SQL file and images.
yes.
1 - PHP (amd other server-side languages) allows you to reuse code, such as menus and headers, across multiple pages while only writing it once in one file. Though technically I could pull this off with JavaScript.
2 - It allows interaction with a database. This is the most important since it means you can add and edit content without editing a single file. This comment, for example, just inserts into a database table.