I am two weeks into my PHP Programming college course. I am writing small PHP code snippets in my HTML files now. To run the code on my machine, I decided to install WAMP. This gave me automatic installations of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and so on.
To start with, I am just dropping HTML files with PHP code into the root Apache web server. That way I can access them via localhost using my browser. As soon as I started making changes to my PHP code to fix bugs, I found some annoying behavior. I click refresh in Internet Explorer. However the browser just shows the results from the old PHP code.
I eventually found a work around. I could click the Back button in IE, then the Forward button, and finally Refresh would work. That was just too many steps to see the latest output from my new code. I was using Internet Explorer 9. But I doubt that version had anything to do with the problem.
I emailed my instructor. He told me to see him after class. Doh. There he walked me through some settings to jiggle in IE. Specifically I chose Internet Options from the Tools menu in IE. Then I clicked the Settings button under the Browsing History group. There I clicked the radio button that said "Every time I visit the web page" under the "Check for new versions of stored pages" label.
Turns out the default value of "Automatically" does not check for new versions of stored pages. I found this to be a weird location for such an option. But I am just glad that every time I click Refresh, IE actually does refresh my browser with a new run of my PHP code.
