Instant Tip Tuesday #1

In this series, I'd like to tackle a number of quick mini-tutorials to cover some useful tricks in PHP, CSS/XHTML, JavaScript, or whatever I happen to be working with at the time.

For our first installment, I'd like to go over a quick function I use to create a preview of text from an entry. When I was first starting to program, this was a sticking point, so I'd like to share how I solved the issue.

Create a Text Preview with PHP

Sometimes showing a title just isn't enough to grab a user's attention. You need to give them a taste of the article to get them to click through and read your content. Generating a text preview is actually fairly simple; below, we'll go through one method of displaying the first few words of... read more

SimpleCMS Part 2 - Images

In part 1 of this series, we went over the basics of reading and writing information in a database, effectively creating a very simple content management system (CMS).

Due to the overwhelmingly positive response, I've decided to continue building on this CMS. I'll be writing a series of tutorials to cover new feature additions to our CMS.

Also, due to helpful criticism from experienced programmers, I'll be trying to address security concerns that were not taken into account in the original tutorial, leaving the CMS vulnerable to attack. However, I don't claim to be a security expert, so if you see room for improvement, let me know in the comments!

Uploading Images

Images are one of the most important parts of any website, so what would our CMS be without the... read more

Reading RSS with PHP

The Problem
The Internet seems to be getting easier everyday. With sites like Myspace, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter, you can essentially create a full-on interactive web experience for free and with no knowledge of web design. This is great, but it limits your creativity, and it also requires your readers to remember multiple separate URLs.

On the flipside, you could reverse engineer all of these tools and create your own versions of them for use on your personal website, creating the same immersive user experience you get from using social tools, but that's a good deal of time and effort. The learning experience of building such tools is great, but we don't always have hundreds of hours to dedicate to rebuilding Flickr's robust photo management. Besides, doesn't it seem a little silly to reinvent the... read more