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,…

If you are developing PHP code for a website you might sometimes want to check which version of Apache or PHP will be running the website. This is particularly true if you use some functionality that was included at a particular revision of the software or if you want to avoid security holes that were…

If your website has a lot of images it is often convenient to create and show a dynamic thumbnail image. This will save on processor and download time for your visitors and they only have to download the images they want to see. One great tool to do this is the GD library. Before you…

When you are working on your website, you will sometimes want to change the level of error reporting that your code returns. This is a great way to get full diagnostic information so that you can fix a problem in your latest piece of code, but be careful to only show error reporting on your…

When you are developing or supporting a website, it does not always work perfectly. Sometimes a visitor will abort a script that is running and when that happens you want to try and avoid that causing a client disconnect. The ignore_user_abort() function determines whether the remote client can abort the running of the script. This…

Lots of international websites now need to display prices in a number of different local currencies. As a web developer, it does not matter if your visitors are using US dollars, Euros, UK Pounds or Japanese Yen, you will want the currency to display properly for all of them. One of the best ways for…

Sometimes it is necessary to divert a visitor to a different page on your website or even an external site. This might be for a variety of reasons: Site maintenance Page retirement Incorrect URL Site busy or failed Automatically jump to first search result Moving to a different domain name In any of these scenario’s…