What's next?

With your new knowledge you should be able to understand most of the manual.

In particular you may want to explore the following features:

• Reading and writing files with the filesystem functions
• Handling file uploads
• Fetching remote pages and files with Curl
• Storing and analyzing data in a database with PDO (SQLite can be used without running a database server)
• Persisting data across requests with Sessions

There's a trove of libraries and » frameworks for every occasion on the » Packagist repository, all installable via the Composer package manager.

For community help and advice, check out the » Help page.

For a variety of podcasts, presentations and other videos, check out the » community PeerTube.

Other community resources that will help you include "awesome lists" (curated directories of links) and "developer roadmaps" (lists of related topics).

When you're stuck with no idea where to start, try breaking down your project or problem into smaller parts, allowing you to more easily see what you already know how to do and what you need to learn. The list can be as deep / detailed as you need. For example, building a blog might be broken down into the following parts:

• Listing and viewing pages
  • Reading records (pages) from a database
• Creating pages
  • Handle form submission
  • Writing records (pages) to a database
• Admin login
  • Reading records (users) from a database
  • Handling passwords
  • Persisting data (user login) across requests / pages (sessions)

If there's nothing particular you want to build, you can try searching for coding exercises such as katas, challenges and "code golf". Even when not specifically aimed at PHP, most should be completable and will likely challenge your knowledge and thinking.