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A few months back, I wrote a post about FileMaker’s built in PHP Site Assistant. It’s a handy tool for creating simple sites, but I find it a bit limiting when it comes to creating more complex sites; so I usually tend to write websites in PHP from scratch. It’s actually been possible to do this for a while: around the time FileMaker Pro 5.5 was released, Chris Hansen wrote the first version of FX.php, which was the first solution I found that allowed you to access FileMaker data using PHP. In fact, it’s still around and available for download, though it hasn’t been updated in a while. Currently, I use FileMaker’s built in PHP API, which was released in 2007.

So where do you start? If you’ve never coded in PHP (or even in HTML), you’ll need to start there. PHP is pretty widely used, so there are a lot of resources available (books, web sites, etc).  I find W3Schools website to be good place to start; PHP’s own online manual is a good resource as well (I usually keep it open as a reference when I’m developing). A Google search (or searching on Amazon) should give you more than enough places to get started.

If you are comfortable using PHP already, especially when it comes to connecting to other databases (MySQL, MSSql, etc) then using FileMaker’s API shouldn’t be too difficult. FileMaker’s own documentation is available online, and should also get installed as a part of FileMaker Server (just look in the FileMaker Server folder on your hard drive – there should be sub folders for Examples, Documentation, and web publishing). As with PHP there are resources available online; FMWebschool is a good one, but again, Google should give you more resources.

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