hearvox on "Create a PHP form in a page and populate it from a MySQL table"

Have you confirmed that $result[0]->name has a non-empty value (when you echo $result[0]->name;)?

You might also do a var_dump( $result ); to see what your SQL query is returning an array of objects. Then make sure the first item in the array, $result[0], has a non-empty value for the property name.