I just installed a WAMP server with PHP 5.3 and for some reason it doesn't parse everything as I'm used to and I can't seem to find why.
Is this related to php.ini or apache configuration?
PHP is not an industry leader, even though it's excellent and very popular.
The main reason for this is because it's free. Many corporations are scared to deal with free software.
DreamWeaver is indeed a very nice IDE supporting many languages.
Visual Studio is probably the most popular IDE...
I'd be surprised if they put a limit on PHP and not on other scripting languages, so there's probably no way around it except using FTP.
On the other hand, I'm not sure it would be so advisable to give your friends access to everything, especially if they don't already know FTP.
Finally you...
It's unclear whether you want to just show it to the person in question. But if that's your goal, you'll need a way of identifying the person.
To show it to anyone, you would simply do a select on your database to find people whose birthday is today (check MySQL's manual).
You just place your PHP start and end tags where you want to embed it, that's it.
To display a single value, you can use the condensed form, as in: <?=$pizza?> will output the contents of $pizza at the position it's placed.
There are at least 2 ways to do this: Apache configuration or creating a folder.
Creating a folder is definitely the simplest solution. You just need to create a folder in your web root called sources and move sources.html to sources/index.html