how to use php/mysql in a custom page?

[kh99]

I don't know exactly why it was done that way. It does have the benefit of being able to allow someone to work on the style of the site without being able to anything dangerous, but I don't know if that was the motivation behind it. In any case, I think it just takes a little bit of thinking in a different way about creating a page.

The existing vb scripts, in a nutshell, build a big string representing the html document to be returned, then output it at the end. Again I don't know why that was done, but it does solve one problem - if you reach a point in the code where you want to redirect the user to a different page, if you haven't created any output yet you can do it by setting a header. So anyway, you could probably convert your code by saving any html bits into a string instead of echoing them (or instead of outputting it by putting it between ?> and <?php). You could do that by putting any html in a template and rendering it, or you could just write php to assign it to a string. Then at the end, render a "big" template (one that represents an entire html document), and include any "bits" as variables.

I guess there's really no reason you couldn't output html directly and not use templates at all - that's how the admincp code works. It's just not the way most of the existing vb code works.