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Some PHP Tips and 'Tricks'

Thinking beyond each page and DESIGNING your web site

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Some Common PHP and Related Issues

These pages are dedicated to some of the issues I found whilst designing and overhauling some PHP websites with and without databases. Some of these issues are not easily findable elsewhere and can be useful.

Some methods will seem obvious to those who have developed using modular programming, unfortunateley a lot of web developers have not done so, as can be seen from many of the sites I have looked at or even rewritten. On one site I took a badly structured database and normalised the data for better performance and expandability, doing this and proper programming techniques enabled NINE different pages for searches to be reduced to ONE simpler module. The worst sin was there was three groups of pages, where in each group of three pages there was only ONE line different in each one!

Considering at the end of 2008, it was estimated that something like 500 web pages are published every second, the state of a lot of the web sites looks like the "infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of computers".

Note The assumption here is a minimum of PHP 5, being used. Test on your setup before using on a live site.

The areas covered are:-

• How to deal with array of checkboxes/tickboxes in PHP and Javascript.
  For those times you need buttons to clear or select all as well as pass selected to PHP (often for database searches or contact forms).
• Making results 'User friendly', for example
  • If you run an online ordering service report saleable quantities as in stock.
  • Form errors reported by errors arrays to original form with comments
• Better PHP scripts for email contact forms that stop more spammers.
• Making maintenance and database operation easier with MySQL (or other services).
  Use GET and POST methods to access one search module, for form entry, and results processing.
• Simple menu systems, use the directory tree to assist you.
• Relative URL parsing and automatic generation for links withion your pages even if parts of site move around easy access to common include files and common paths.
• (Planned for release soon) Menu systems revisited, a self contained example for you to test.
• Email processing script - Actually a set of scripts and example self-contained. Using attributes discussed in Email forms section.
• Miscellaneous small tips, code snippets or practises that may help with dofferent server configurations.

Related useful websites

www.php.net home of PHP

Standalone PHP server to use on your own machine, without a true web server.

W3 Schools Online schools for various web markup and programming for the following and more -

• PHP
• HTML
• XHTML
• XML
• Javascript
• CSS