For those of you who have been following the last few screencasts, you must have noticed that each tutorial has been centered around a “photo site” theme. (See Scanning Folders With PHP, How to Dynamically Create Thumbnails, and Create a Photo-Admin Site Using PHP and jQuery. Today, we’ll build the backend for a photo site. This tutorial will teach you how to add, delete, and update photos.

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Let’s imagine that you want to build a page that will display snapshots of your latest work. One way to do this would be to hard-code the images into your document. The obvious repercussion is that, every time you want to add a new item, you must manually update your html document. Another method would be to store and retrieve the information from a MYSQL database. This will function perfectly, though for many sites, this solution may possibly offer far more power than is technically needed – not to mention the increase in hosting costs.

In such instances, the best solution is to make PHP scan your “portfolio” folder and dynamically create the code for you. If you want to update your page with a new snapshot, all that you need to do is drag the image, and its respective thumbnail, into the appropriate folders – and PHP will do the rest. Let’s build it now!

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I’m pleased to present you with part one of a two part series on creating a photo site using PHP, jQuery, and AJAX. Originally, I intended to fit the entire tutorial into one screencast, but that quickly became a pipe dream as I realized that there was simply too much to cover. Nevertheless, even if you only watch this first video, you should learn a great deal.

We’ll be retrieving images from a database, creating a simple login form with authentication, and will then allow for our database to be asynchronously updated. Sounds good? If so, let’s get into it.

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