Over the past couple of months I’ve gained a lot of experience with PHP as well as page design with CSS. I’ve spent time working on my test website discuss.nathancheek.com as well as working on the messaging part of Andy Y.’s Dropbox Forums extension.
Almost every time I get stuck on something not working correctly and spend a few minutes to a few hours figuring it out, the solution is quite simple. For example, I am utilizing functions to interact with the database for things like posting a message or changing settings. One thing I forgot in some of these functions was to make them connect to the database by using include. Of course the functions did not work until I realized the simple mistake. Also, I have discovered that error logs are very useful when trying to determine why a page will not load. I now know that among other things, just missing a called function will cause the page to not load.
With the messaging site that Andy Y. built, I was able to change it to be more secure from attacks either on the database or the user. Also, while it did not involve much change in the PHP code, I updated the design to use Bootstrap. I now plan on spending time tackling interesting things such as user authentication and design issues such as selecting multiple messages.