Hi! I meant to respond earlier, but I have actually been in PHP hell for the past 24-48 hours.

Okay, so, I am always hesitant to recommend books. Because, I think programming books are generally not helpful if you learn a certain way, however, one resource I use is PHP The Right Way! I really love this. I used to read it religious before Ophanimkei became PHP based and I still check it relatively often. I.. don't have it in my resources.. cause I forgot to add it. (dumb as fuck). I actually struggled to find really good resources for PHP and SQL but I like dhtis one.. It was nice for my brain! It helped me bridge that gap... Between looking at Github and understanding nothing to being able to sort out stuff. 

It is an actively updated project that I am constantly referencing. I used to do a lot of practice exercises for it too, once upon a time. It is completely free and continously updated.  I think it is the best PHP resource ever because it is a living document with an active community.. I use Github but have some cognizance of what will fail on my servers and tend to reference this a lot. I fuck up a lot of basic syntax for PHP but can double check here.

Regarding Pheonix and XAMPP, it does show me you are motivated T_T I struggle to explain XAMPP to most people because most people who use PHP use VSC which makes set up a bit easier.. I think you can do it. PHP is like.. extremely ugly. It's like... The ugliest language I've ever worked with.  It's why I take long breaks and get confused. It's ugly and likes to not work for little reasons.

Do you know how to debug? I am unsure of what bug is happening exactly. If you are using XAMPP, I assume you already get basic debugging reports from your local server itself. When it fails, you have to make your own.. This is why my diary took forever to build too. There are probably still unused functions in there from me.. tweaking.. out!! There are tools to help you debug though sometimes you have to tell PHP to report errors too.. There are multiple ways to do this. PHP! The Right Way talks about it too.

I'm really praying for you anon. Do know I am in a similar boat. I have been tweaking out over my character script on and off for the past year.. The pain is high but the dividends are so good! If the book helps or does not help, please let me know. I can go further back into my files and links if it's not useful!

I got started with fanlistings because Koiniko let me freely use her fanlistings script then she updated it to be integrated into Onionrin. The fanlistings SQL was eventually converted into the blog script that is used for my diary (which I unfortunately have private right now).

Often on Github I'd look for preexisting free to use scripts. They tended to be too robust so I'd strip stuff stuff out... Then build onto it. I was learning little things in PHP prior but seeing other's people code helped, especially cause I can bug Koinuko too. I still feel I'm very early in my PHP journey. I still like to build off of existing code bases.. My diary was a very long project.

But like.. I struggled with the syntax for directory reading so had php use filenames for a long time (my archive is named with 2017-name.png for organization). I still kind of like that more for my workflows even if directories work better for most people..

I also think it's tools like Intelephesense help a lot. You can download the extension on VSC but it can be set up on your pc for other editors (I haven't done this yet but I miss her). It is a language server.. PHP is different from a lot of languages because you need to set up a language server to fully use an IDE's capabilities.. Intelephesense takes care of a lot of that but it is not my server of choice right now but I may use it again when I need more robust code error reporting again..

I don't know what you are making, so it's hard for me to give you a place to start.. But I'd go one piece at a time and make sure you aren't overcomplicating things.. If it has a gallery, what are you looking for? Do you want it sorted by year? If directories are failing, PHP can be weird with directories so I'd look at potentially other ways to handle it. Are you making a basic log? You may have luck looking at forms that use txt files and going through random github projects.

Solutions do not have to be sophisticated! And well.. struggling is normal too. I've cried many times over PHP lol. I still do as I tried to improve my character storage script T-T