Here’s another way to connect to the database:

// Connect with username, password, etc...
$link = mysqli_connect('localhost', 'userName', 'passWord');
if (!$link){
    $error = 'Unable to connect to the database server.';
    include 'error.html.php';
    exit();
}

// Set Charset
if (!mysqli_set_charset($link, 'utf8')){
    $error = 'Unable to set database connection encoding.';
    include 'error.html.php';
    exit();
}

// select database
if (!mysqli_select_db($link, 'ijdb')){
    $error = 'Unable to locate the database.';
    include 'error.html.php';
    exit();
}

This script runs through the different tasks, and if it’s successful, it moves onto the next. If there is a problem, a message is saved to the $error variable, and a HTML template is included to show it.

Writing queries is slightly different, and goes like this:

$result = mysqli_query($link, 'SELECT * FROM tableName WHERE conditions');
if (!$result){
    $error = 'Error with query!';
    include 'error.html.php';
    exit();
}

while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)){
    var1 = $row['col1'];
    var2 = $row['col2'];
    var3 = $row['col3'];
    // etc...
}