How to Run PHP Code in WordPress

I was presented with a challenge the other day to retrieve data residing on a MySQL database and have it displayed on our client’s page. I decided to use PHP code since WordPress is built upon PHP but surprisingly without a plugin WordPress ignores the PHP code.

Also surprisingly was the fact that there are a lot of plugins to help with this problem. For my challenge I chose PHP-Exec, but I’ve seen others recommend PHP-Execution because it does NOT turn off the visual editor.

Below is the code that I used to connect to the mySQL database, create a table (I know, I know no DIV or CSS?) and set up an array to have the data run through and populate the table in the table rows.

<?php
//Connect To Database
$hostname=’xxxx’;
$username=’xxxx’;
$password=’xxxx’;
$dbname=’xxxx’;$usertable=’xxxx’;
mysql_connect($hostname,$username, $password) OR DIE (‘Unable to connect to database! Please try again later.’);mysql_select_db($dbname);

echo ”
<table border=’1′ width=’500′><tr><th>First Name</th><th>Last Name</th><th>Email</th></tr>”;
$query = ‘SELECT * FROM ‘ . $usertable;
$result = mysql_query($query);if($result) {    while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){       echo “<tr width=’500′>”;  echo “<td>” . $row['FirstName'] . “</td>”;  echo “<td>” . $row['LastName'] . “</td>”;
echo “<td><a href=\”mailto:” . $row['Email']. “\”>” . $row['Email']. “</a></td>”;
echo “</tr>”;
}
echo “</table>”;
}
?>

Here is the video tutorial on YouTube: