Creating the web page

Our Web-based control panel is going to be a single PHP-driven HTML5 web page which will be mobile optimized. HTML5 is the latest mark-up standard for web pages and is supported by most modern smartphones and browsers. We will also create a cascading style-sheet (CSS) that will make our page look half reasonable on mobile devices.

To create the web files, I recommend that you use something like the excellent Notepad++ on your desktop computer, rather than doing it directly on the Raspberry Pi. Alternatively, if you are a seasoned web developer, you may already have your IDE of choice.

The control panel HTML template

The first thing we'll do is create an HTML file that we can use to test our layout before we put the HTML into a PHP file to make it interact with our system. This makes it easier to tweak the way we want it to look beforehand, without the PHP scripts getting in the way.

Note

This is not a tutorial on Web development—there is a plethora of books out there on...