PHP does anything you want, except sit on its head and spin. Actually, with a little on-the-fly image manipulation and dynamic HTML, it could probably do that, too.
According to me , “The goal of the language is to allow Web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.”

Here are some common uses of PHP:

• Perform system functions: create, open, read from, write to, and close files on your system; execute system commands; create directories; and modify permissions.
• Gather data from forms: save the data to a file, send data via e-mail, and return manipulated data to the user.
• Access databases and generate content on the fly, or create a Web interface for adding, deleting, and modifying elements within your database.
• Set cookies and access cookie variables.
• Start sessions and use session variables and objects.
• Restrict access to sections of your Web site.
• Create images on the fly.
• Encrypt data.