730 PHP Tutorials. Page 2

Whoever said CSS would solve all your cross-platform browser display issues needs to lay off the pipe a little. I have yet to get CSS to work perfectly across all browsers / platforms, but I have gotten it to work good enough to get by. I did it by using some fairly simplistic browser detection, as in recycling a library I wrote for SourceForge (which was recycled from a library on GotoCity.com). Here are some of the things I discove...

Welcome to the first of three tutorials in a series that covers network programming in PHP. In this article you will learn how to use some useful PHP networking functions that will help you perform a variety of common networking tasks. To that end, you will build a simple networking query application in PHP 5.

The traditional method of building dynamic, PHP-based Web sites - mixing HTML elements with PHP code - can result in mangled Web pages (and much user angst) if errors take place during script execution. But yes, you can avoid the ugliness - plug in our handy error reporting class, which provides a simple way of trapping script errors and generating consistent, user-friendly error screens. One of the most fundamental tasks during the development c...

In the previous installment of this four-part series regarding creating spatially enabled Web applications, you learned how to create a local datasource mapping mailing addresses to latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates using the Geo::Coder::US Perl package and the U.S Census Bureau s TIGER/Line data. In this final installment, you ll learn how to make this data available to the world through a Perl-based Web service. To demonstrate the servic...

If you re one of those PHP developers that wants to expand your background in pattern-based programming, then this article may suit your needs. Welcome to the second part of the series Understanding the Chain of Responsibility Between PHP Objects. Comprised of three installments, this series goes through the basics of building a chain of responsibility across several PHP objects, and teaches you how to apply this pattern by using copious code s...

One of my most common activities during the development cycle for a Web application involves writing code to validate the data entered into online forms.

How many times have you sat down to code a script and - halfway through - thought to yourself, Didn t I do something similar just last week?

Most developers must deal with the job of developing robust data validation for forms on a regular basis. Nobody wants to write the same code over and over, so this article (the first of three in a series) will help you develop an extensible and reusable form validation package. By the end of the article, you will have all the relevant classes that integrate the generator module of the PHP form processor.

In this second part of a three-part series, we take up the topic of server-side validation. By the time you finish this article, you ll have the general guidelines for how to build a form validating class. You ll use some PHP built-in introspection functions, along with regular expressions, to assist you in building this class.

Welcome to the last part of the series Building a PHP 5 form processor. In three parts, this series goes through the development of an extensible form processor package in PHP 5, explaining its benefits and demonstrating its implementation.

It s almost hard to believe that, up until a few years ago, putting pen to paper was still the most common method of corresponding with long-lost relatives or distant business partners. Today, email is all-pervasive - it has a user base ranging from doting grandmothers to over-enthusiastic dot-commers - and is, by far, the fastest, most efficient way to communicate. Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistin...

In the first part of this article, I demonstrated the basics of PHP s IMAP functions, using them to connect to a POP3 server and retrieve a list of messages from it. I also explained how to extract important message headers, showed you how to delete selected messages from the server, and gave you a crash course in PHP s session management functions.

In the previous segment of this case study, I taught you a little bit about how MIME attachments work, and demonstrated a few functions to handle multipart MIME email. At the end of that article, you had a fully-functional mail reader, though not one, alas, that allowed you to actually compose, forward or reply to a message. This concluding segment will rectify that problem, enhancing the application already developed by adding support for these ...

I recently had the opportunity to implement some small (noncommercial) web sites in PHP. One of many decisions I faced concerned the templating strategy: duplicated, include()-based template pages weren t quite future-proof, while a formal, external template library would have been overkill. // ); //]] Luckily, the web host in question permitted certain key Apache directives in .htaccess that let me customize request handling. Add to that PHP s ...

Want to plug into what your site visitors actually think? All you need is a little time, a dollop of imagination and a copy of patGuestbook. More, inside. One of the nice things about the Web has always been the diverse mix of people on it. In the relative anonymity of the Web, artists and sculptors hang out side-by-side with lawyers, accountants and CEOs, each with their own particular brand of views and opinions (which they re usually only too ...

In this concluding article of our two-part series on rapid guestbook implementation with patGuestbook, find out how to tweak patGuestbook a litle more by controlling the viewable entries, customizing the user interface, and protecting access to the administration module. In the first part of this article, I gave you a quick rundown on the patGuestbook application, right from downloading the application to the nitty-gritty of installation, configu...

Looking to quickly add a dynamic news page to your corporate orpersonal Web site? This article shows you how, combining PHP s rapidapplication development capabilities with a MySQL database to create aprimitive news publishing system and administration module in just underfour hours. In the highly competitive world of Web development, there s a crying need for a toolkit that allows developers to rapidly and efficiently construct dynamic, robust ...

Tag boards enable users to leave a short message on your site without having to go through the trouble of registering. From a development point of view, they are actually rather simple to develop. In this article we will create a quick and easy tag board for any web site. We will be taking advantage of the php and MySQL technologies.

You may be familiar with relational databases, but what is a relational content management system? Read on to learn how to build this system, which helps you create a search engine friendly site fairly quickly.

A little while ago, I was working on an intranet site for a mid-sized company. As the site grew in both size and popularity, the assigner requested me to extend the site with a search feature. Since one of the rules of the intranet was that all logic code should be written in-house, using an existing open source engine was not an option. // ); //]] Within a day, the engine was quite complete, and the result actually turned out better than expect...

In this third article of the series, I ll show you how the database and directories should be set up. I ll also talk about the how to create, install, and use a content block, which mostly relies on arrays and array functions. I ll cover proper authentication methods for such a project so that multiple sites can run off the same users table in the database, while not barring a username from being used on a site because it is being use on ano...

Content management systems are becoming very popular, but what if you took it a step further than that? That s exactly what I plan to show you how to do in this series of articles. I m going to explain how to build a site engine. A site engine is a core code base and database that can run multiple sites that are completely different while all running in unison, using all the same code, yet separate from each other.

If you read the

In the last three articles we went over a basic idea of how a site engine works, how to build the plug-in, module, and block systems, the basic directory structure, the database structure, and the authentication methods. In this, the fourth article, we ll be going over the template system, and the basic page loading methods. So, let s go ahead and get started.

So you want to use your site engine that you ve been working on? Okay, now is the time for me to show you how to add plug-ins, modules, blocks, and templates to your database so that they will work with your engine. It s not that hard to do, and with just a few simple steps, you ll be running your site off your new stylish site engine in no time.

It is easy to create a templating system in PHP; in fact, there are a number of templating system packages. But what if you re putting together a relatively small website, and don t really need one of those full-fledged systems? In this first part of a two-part article, you will learn how to create a simple but extensible PHP class for parsing templates.

In part one of this two part article series, you learned how to build a simple template parser class in PHP. In this second article, you will learn how to add caching capabilities to the class.

If you re one of those PHP developers that want to extend your background in object-based applications, then this series might be quite attractive to you. In these three tutorials (of which this is the second), you ll learn how to simulate a simple Model-View-Controller schema, which can be easily expanded to construct more complex relationships between the different entities, in this case applicable specifically to PHP classes.

Almost every dynamic Web application eventually boils down to accessing, manipulating, and presenting information. A forum is an idea example of this type of application. Users register at the site; their information is added to the database. Someone wants to post a new message? The database is queried to validate the user and again to store the message once the user has finished writing it. Displaying each page, the forum listing, the threads li...

In the previous article you were introduced to the basics of PHP and MySQL. We explored some of the functions PHP provides for working with MySQL and saw how they could be used to retrieve, edit, add and delete information from a database. The functions covered in the last article are at the core of creating even the most complex database driven web site. In this article, you will learn how to pull those functions together to create a fully funct...

When I first wrote this column back in January 1999, I had no clue that it was going to be so wildly popular, and I had even less of a clue that PHPBuilder was going to take off and become as widely-used as it is today. Since this topic seems to be so important to a wide range of developers, I ll revisit it in more detail, sharing more bits of code with you. Almost any developer knows that search engine placement is critical to the success of a ...

Almost any developer knows that search engine placement is critical to the success of a web site. What many people don t know is that a lot of search engines cannot index many database-driven pages (basically any page with a ? or and in the URL). So when I set about building gotoCity.com, one of my goals was to make the site database-driven, but still indexable. I didn t want any use of cookies or mile-long URLs, and the site had to be co-...

If you re starting to delve deeper into object-oriented programming with PHP, and also want to know how to include polymorphic objects into your own scripts, this might be the right opportunity to learn more about this interesting topic. Welcome to the second part of the series that began with Using polymorphism with objects in PHP 5. In three articles, this series provides you with a comprehensive guide on how to take advantage of polymorphism...

Cellular phones supporting WAP are slowly, but constantly spreading. Therefore, it could be time for you to start building your WML pages to access internet databases. As such, we will show you how to build PHP/WML pages to access a MySQL database which contains professors receiving hours and exams timetables for a University. I m testing a beta service of this kind, prepared with Vitaveska Lanfranchi, at www.scidecom.it. There are some things ...

If you have ever written an application that primarily parses commands -- and who hasn t? -- keep reading. As is often the case, pattern-based programming makes this task easier. In this first part of a three-part article series, you ll learn the basic concepts surrounding the Interpreter pattern, with plenty of hands-on examples.

There have been numerous requests on the Support Forums recently asking how to do NEXT 1 2 3 4 5 PREV type links from a search result. I hope the following script will help you add this functionality to your search result pages. This example is written for MySQL but can be adapted quite easily to other SQL engines. Since each application is different I ve used some generic statements for the MySQL queries. TABLE should be replaced wit...

When I wrote my first article on this subject, my intention was NOT to provide working code but rather to provide a thought process that individuals could use to solve their own unique problems. Judging by some of the comments and questions posted here, that was not what most people wanted. Unfortunately, I have not the time or desire to write code that will work for all individuals in all cases. The following code will work fine (with, possibly...

Welcome to part two of the series Building Object-Oriented Database Interfaces in PHP. In the previous article, I offered complete coverage of the role that database interfaces play in Web applications, highlighting the immediate benefits of having a centralized mechanism for accessing, processing and verifying data, within an object-oriented environment. The DBIGenerator class I showed for demonstration purposes in the first article doesn t ...

With websites now featuring full-blown dynamic applications that link to databases, data accessing has become a critical process. Often, an object-oriented solution is wanted to manage the data access operations. This works well, except when certain statements are hard-coded in that can cause headaches when a update is required. Alejandro Gervasio explains how a new category of tools, known as database interfaces, help to solve this problem.

In this fourth and final article in the tutorial series, Alejandro Gervasio updates the DBIGenerator class developed in the previous articles. The new version incorporates features in PHP 5, such as member visibility, exceptions, and other useful items.

In previous articles in this series, we examined the concept of database interfaces, and saw source code for a DBIGenerator class. Working with multiple DB interfaces permits the accomplishment of several operations on many tables at the same time. Alejandro Gervasio demonstrates the power of this concept, with examples.

Looking for a RAD tool to help you quickly and efficiently develop PHP-based Web applications? Or just new to PHP and MySQL in general? You might want to spend some time with Dreamweaver MX, Macromedia s latest revision of their venerable HTML editor, which comes with some nifty new ideas designed to minimize hand-coding of PHP scripts. You ve already heard of Macromedia Flash, the de facto standard for high quality Web animation. But Flash is no...

In this third part of a four-part article series on building a PHP email application, we will look at the index page. This page is the heart of the application. We will also look at how to handle attachments in a message and how to integrate them into this application.

SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol has built his concept on XML-RPC, but provides much richer features sets. In this article we are going to build a simple SOAP server and client which will use our new service. You should know what SOAP is (SOAP packet structure), but purpose of this article is to show programmers how easy is to build web services (SOAP). Even if you don t know XML, SOAP, WSDL, the only requirement is basic XML kn...

Need to manipulate XML document trees, but don t have the DOM extension compiled into your PHP build? Take a look at XMLTree, a PEAR class that allows you to create and manipulate XML document trees without requiring the PHP DOM extension. If you ve been following past issues of this column, you re probably already aware of the numerous things you can do with XML and PHP. You also probably already know the basics - that there are two ways XML can...

In this article I will show how to use a modular system to create a website that is constructed on the fly using dynamic modules, which for performance sake can be cached if you want. Each module is a php script on its own, returning html data to be included in the final html page. Overview php scripted modules that implement functionality (e.g. a style definition, menu or discussion board) a parser that can construct the html page by reading in...

In the previous installment of this series you learned how to query the geocoder.us Web service using PHP and its native SOAP extension. This Web service converts mailing addresses into latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates; a task that can be very useful when integrating features such as Google s mapping service into your applications. Offering both a free and commercial service, consider learning more about this excellent service should you...

The benefits of PHP as a server-side, cross-platform HTML scripting language are generally acknowledged. // ); //]] However, PHP s advantages for developing wireless applications are less well known. PHP is a great tool to generate Wireless Markup Language (WML) for the WAP protocol, and cHTML (a subset of HTML) for i-Mode. For example, PHP can generate different markup languages for the same URL request depending on device requirements (does th...

For those of you who have been interested in the evolution of the Cached Dynamic Modules, here s the 3rd Incarnation. This article is written on the assumption that you are partly familiar with the Cached Dynamic Modules script. These first few pages go over the additions, and updates to the original code; then dives right into the (pretty) source code. The code should look familiar because a lot of the code used in this version has been used ve...

Contents: Caching in context Where to get PEAR Cache How PEAR Cache works Function call caching Output caching Customized solutions Caching in context Caching is currently a hot topic in the PHP world. Because PHP produces dynamic web pages, scripts must be run and results must be calculated each time a web page is requested, regardless if the results are the same each time. In addition, PHP compiles the script every time it is requested. This ov...

Caching within the context of PHP application acceleration can be triggered based on three possible categories: time expiry, content change, and manually. This article covers an application that triggers the caching mechanism based on a content change condition.

With many websites using a database backend for storing and delivering content, certain common problems arise. One of these is a situation that causes the server to slow down or even bring the system to a complete halt. What can you do to reduce the load on your server? This tutorial discusses one method, a result set caching system, and demonstrates how to implement it with either a procedural or an object-oriented approach.

Welcome to the final part of the series Caching Result Sets in PHP. Hopefully, the last chapter of this tutorial will help you to put together all of the classes developed in the previous part, and demonstrate how the complete caching system can be implemented in a PHP 5 controlled environment.

In this article, we work directly with a standalone caching class, showing how it interacts with other objects. We will work with aggregation and composition to achieve our goals, which include implementing a time expiry based caching mechanism.

In this part of the series, you will see in detail an updated version of each class that composes the caching system, for a correct implementation in PHP 5. Also, the Cache class will be modified to work with an array processor class that handles array operations. It should help refresh your memory of techniques related to object-oriented programming.

While procedural caching may be well-suited for small and even medium-sized applications, the picture changes for large projects. That s when object-oriented approaches come into their own. This article focuses on developing an object-based extensible caching solution.

Often PHP is used to generate pages that do not change all that often. It isn t that PHP is used to make every page different for every user but that the page is simply built dynamically. In these situations, it is often the case that, the page really doesn t change all that often, perhaps only once a day, if that. In these cases, therefore, it is a waste of CPU time to regenerate the web page for every user. One solution is to not have your PHP...

As Web applications become more and more complex, cleverdevelopers can use application-level caching to improve the performanceof their PHP scripts. This article shows you how, discussing the PEARCache_Lite class with examples that illustrate how it can be used in alive environment.

Information theory (IT) is a foundational subject for computer scientists, engineers, statisticians, data miners, biologists, and cognitive scientists. Unfortunately, PHP currently lacks software tools that would make it easy to explore and/or use IT concepts and methods to solve data analytic problems. This two-part series aims to remedy this situation by: // ); //]] Introducing you to foundational information theory concepts. Implementing thes...

Are you looking for an easygoing article that teaches you how to implement the Observer design pattern inside your PHP 5 applications? Your search is finished! Welcome to the last part of the series The Observer Pattern in PHP. Made up of three articles, this series will show you how to create and work with observer objects, without making you scratch your head while looking at complex code samples.

This chapter explores editing table definitions and using special column types. When developing Web applications (or any application), requirements often change because of new or modified needs. Developers must accommodate these changes through judicious table-structure editing. This is chapter six of

This tutorial shows you how to make a ChatterBlock. ChatterBlocks are small windows where users can type in messages. They re also called Shout Boxes or TagBoards and are kind of like miniature chat rooms.

Trust is everything in this day and age. You have to trust a lot of people, from the guy who gives you directions to your local plumber. After all, you re not always the authority. However, when developing applications for the web, you must assume the role of authority. Otherwise, the user will assume the role, which is a big gamble: total data integrity, data corruption, or diversion of data -- if the user is the authority, you don t know what ...

The hardest concept I ve tried to understand since beginning to use PHP was that of classes. I d never used a database engine but learning to use MySQL, at least for the more basic functions, was a breeze. Having never used OOP before, classes were novel as well, but understanding the theory and why it was useful escaped me. I knew they must be powerful as everything is programmed using OOP, but for the life of me, although I thought...

A class is a function of PHP that has its roots in object oriented programming. The ability to use classes in PHP has been increasing with later versions. If you want to add the power of classes to your PHP programming, keep reading.

As your Web site gets more and more popular, you re going to need a capable banner management program to help you keep track of customers, banners and clicks. Take a look at phpBanner, which just might be what you re looking for!

What s an invoicing system that can t manage the data for the clients you re invoicing? This article, the third of four parts, shows how to make managing your clients easy. This part of the system allows you to view a full list of client names, and add, update or remove clients from your database.

In this article, the fourth and final one of our series covering the creation of a PHP email application, we are going to look at the code for some of the remaining pages of the mail application. Chief among these is the NewMsg.php page, which is where items, to be more precise, new messages, are either saved as drafts or saved as sent messages.

PHP has only a limited ability to support collections in the way that other programming languages such as C# and Java do, as far as the manner of access. This article navigates one possible solution.

In the first part of this series we implemented a basic sortable collection class. We used a Bubble Sort algorithm to order the elements in the collection, which came with a disclaimer regarding what a slow sort it is. This article will examine the primary sorting algorithms with code examples, and some empirical data regarding how they perform in relation to one another, as well as the size of the data set in question.

The built-in COM functionality of PHP4 is quite attractive for some of us programming in the win32 environment. So far, there is not much documentation on the subject. This short article will explain how to use COM in real PHP4 programming with three examples using MS office 2000 Word and Excel programs and the Adobe Distiller program. The COM technology has been developed by Microsoft for several years, under different names. As far as this art...

So you ve finally set up your Web site, plugged in some interesting content, and got yourself into the Google database. And, against all your expectations, the public actually likes your Web site. People are telling each other about it, and visiting it again and again. Slashdot decided to review it, and the results almost melted your ISP s network. And - wonder of wonders - people have started emailing you about advertising on your suddenly-popul...