Why you Should be using PHP’s PDO for Database Access

Why you Should be using PHP’s PDO for Database Access

Many PHP programmers learned how to access databases by using either the MySQL or MySQLi extensions. As of PHP 5.1, there’s a better way. PHP Data Objects (PDO) provide methods for prepared statements and working with objects that will make you far more productive!

Progressively Enhance a Form to a Modal Form

Progressively Enhance a Form to a Modal Form

With something as important as a contact form, you want it working properly for all visitors—even the JavaScript challenged. How do you handle this if you want to use a modal (pop-up) form? The answer is progressive enhancement; start with baseline, usable functionality; then increase the user experience for those who have browsers to support it.

Creating a Web Poll with PHP

Creating a Web Poll with PHP

Polls are nearly ubiquitous on the web today, and there are plenty of services that will provide a drop-in poll for you. But what if you want to write one yourself? This tutorial will take you through the steps to create a simple PHP-based poll, including database setup, vote processing, and displaying the poll.

HTML Parsing and Screen Scraping with the Simple HTML DOM Library

HTML Parsing and Screen Scraping with the Simple HTML DOM Library

If you need to parse HTML, regular expressions aren’t the way to go. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use an open source, easily learned parser, to read, modify, and spit back out HTML from external sources. Using nettuts as an example, you’ll learn how to get a list of all the articles published on the site and display them.

Building a 5 Star Rating System with jQuery, AJAX and PHP

Building a 5 Star Rating System with jQuery, AJAX and PHP

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a rating system with AJAX, PHP, and jQuery. Votes will be recorded and updated in real-time with the magic of AJAX, and we’ll also leverage the power of PHP so that you don’t even need a database!