Using databases to store user identification, image information, and so much more for dynamic websites is the easiest way to ease maintenance. MySQL is the most popular choice of database, and in this article, I’ll explain the most basic functions: connecting and using a MySQL database and its respective tables.

When you visit a site, their usual advertisers might catch your eye once or twice, but after that, you forget it’s there. Designing a banner ad that automatically updates with information such as current sales or latest blog posts is a great way to get repeat clicks and return visitors. In this article, [...]

Sometimes a complex PHP-built website can become tedious when dealing with minor changes to the template and HTML markup. Changing, for instance, a set of links (navigation) or other integral parts of a website, can become quite the lengthy process. In this article, I’ll share a technique that I sometimes use to make something as simple as a website navigation a little more automated using an explosive function.

Using Akismet to block spam on your Wordpress blog is a no-brainer, but what about your custom blog or article site? It is possible to extend the Akismet anti-spam service to your own custom website. In this article, you will find a fully functional Akismet library for CodeIgniter as well as instructions and [...]

As CSS expands, so does web design as a whole, but where it still lacks (and most likely will always lack) is in the area of fonts. Depending on the user’s home computer and the actions he/she has taken on it, there are different fonts inherently available. In this article, however, we will talk about bypassing the user’s system and use the fonts you would like, via PHP and the GD library.

We’ve seen the graphics PHP can create for you, but how extensive is PHP’s ability to edit preexisiting images? In this article, I will explore some common functions that image editing software provides, but I’ll only use PHP.  We’ll focus mainly on cropping, resizing, flipping, and adding some effects to photos.

In this article, learn how to fetch the latitude & longitude location of all major US cities. I’m going to provide you with a comprehensive list of almost 500 major US cities as well as the source, so you can get the updated list as city sizes change.

This is just a simple tip that presents a simple proposition – stop closing your PHP tags. Why? I will explain in this article. Keep in mind that this idea / standard only applies to PHP files that are only for PHP – no HTML.

Decision structures form the basis of all programming languages; just as they sound, these constructs move the program down a certain path depending on variables which are checked.  This gives a program functionality and the ability to handle different input and analyze the data within the script.

I use this technique to show the most popular posts on our homepage, and although this isn’t a core feature in Wordpress, it’s not all that hard to do. All it takes is a little PHP and a single edit to one of your Wordpress template files.