A quick and easy way to improve the appearance of your website is to ensure that your copyright notice is always up-to-date. Learn how to use PHP to automatically update the year in your copyright notice and other dynamic information in your website’s footer.
One of the cool and overlooked features of PHP is the presence of “magic constants”. These predefined constants provide helpful information about the current environment or context in which a script runs. Here are the nine magic constants currently available in PHP: These magic constants can be handy in a variety of situations. For example,…
An enum, or enumeration, is a data type that consists of a set of named values. In PHP, enums allow you to create a fixed set of constants representing a specific data type. The primary purpose of enums in PHP is to provide a convenient way to define a set of related constants representing a…
I am not a big fan of the “Try Catch” syntax in PHP, but in some cases, it is necessary. This is a way of capturing exceptions in a section of code and gives you complete control over what to do. The basic syntax is: I find the code gets messy and hard to understand…
This shorthand syntax is a nice and simple way to increase or decrease an integer variable by 1: And for subtracting: You may know this already, but there is a bit more to these operators when working with strings that you might not be aware of: It gets even more interesting… See more examples in…
PHP has developed into a more strictly typed language in recent years. Type Declarations help with that and are a fairly new addition to PHP, with recent releases improving them further. They give you more precise, concise code, clarity, validation, type-hinting and more. But first… what are Type Declarations? Take a look at this example:…
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a scripting language that is a great tool for web developers to use when they want to produce dynamic web pages. Embed your PHP code into the HTML source and the PHP processor on the web server interprets it and generates the web page document. It does not matter if you…
There are a few other methods that you can use to hide your usage of PHP from visitors to your website. Another trick is to use filenames without extensions and then tell Apache to process them as a PHP file. This can be done easily by amending your .htaccess file to include the following lines:…
If you are the web developer for a site, then you might not want visitors to know that you are using PHP for your scripting. One simple way around this is to use a different extension for the PHP files instead of the default .php. You can use any extension that you want including: .htm…
It is common now for developers to use email as a means of communicating with users from the web site. There are many reasons that you might want to do this including: Confirmation of user action Password reset Send error logs to site administrator Before you start to configure your PHP scripts to send email,…
