20 Useful PHP Components & Tutorials for Everyday Project

25 Mar 2009

Web applications have made huge leaps and bounds in improving user experience thanks to a lot of recently developed Ajax technology. When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of javascript you can produce some pretty cool results. In an effort to help you take it up a notch, we’d like to share some methods for helping your site anticipate a user’s next move.

The list below is made up of the best 20 FREE PHP Components and Tutorials that you will likely need in many of your projects, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure. Give them a try.

1. Charts

pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. Most of todays chart libraries have a cost, our project is intended to be free. Data can be retrieved from SQL queries, CSV files, or manually provided. This project is still under development and new features or fix are made every week. Focus has been put on rendering quality introducing an aliasing algorithm to draw eye candy graphics. Rendering speed has been dramatically enhanced since the first version, we’ll still continue optimising the code!

2. PHP components: Autosuggest

PHP component ready to use to implement a search form with an autosuggest feature using PHP and MySQL.

3. Animated Ajax Record Deletion Using MooTools

If you are a huge fan of WordPress’ method of individual article deletion where you click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here’s how to achieve that functionality with MooTools javascript.

if(isset($_GET['delete']))
{
	$query = 'DELETE FROM my_table WHERE item_id = '.(int)$_GET['delete'];
	$result = mysql_query($result,$link);
}

4. Sanitize and Validate Data with PHP Filters

Data validation is an integral part of working with forms. Not only can invalid submitted data lead to security problems, but it can also break your webpage. In this tutorial we’ll take a look at how to remove illegal characters and validate data by using the “filter_var” function.

5. How to Build a Login System for a Simple Website

In this tutorial you will learn how to build a login system with PHP and MYSQL. Many, many features will be covered; including MySqli, Prepared Statements, jQuery, Classes, Sessions, Cookies, etc.

6. Building Your First Simple CMS

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a simple PHP class that will:

Create a database
Connect to a database
Display a form with two fields
Save the form data in the database
Display the saved data from the database

7. HOW-TO: Reddit-style Voting With PHP, MySQL And jQuery

If you are a regular at Reddit, you must have noticed the way people vote there. You can either vote up or vote down. Pretty interesting, huh? This tutorial will show you how to create such a voting system with jQuery, PHP and MySQL.

Check out the demo here

8. Easy Pagination with PHP and Mootools

This is a PHP Page class that handles the database queries, generating ajax page navigation and even creates the Javascript for you.

Check out the demo here

9. Caching Dynamic PHP pages easily

Looking for a solution to cache heavy pages and just serve a static html version for a little while now, and here is a solution in output buffering.

Check out the demo here

10. Directory trees with php and jquery

A simple way to keep track of many files is to use a directory tree. A directory tree lists out files and directories so that it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. In this tutorial, we will create a directory tree using PHP and jQuery.

Check out the demo here

11. jQuery – PHP & Ajax with the Twitter API

Learn how you can use jQuery, PHP and a little ajax to connect up to the Twitter API and return results. When you load your HTML it will call the javascript function getSearch() to return Twitter Search API results every 30 seconds.

12. How to Make a Password Strength Meter Like Google

Password strength meters are becoming more and more popular amongst web services. Google uses one when creating a Google account. Here is how to create one yourself.

Check out the demo here

13. Backup Your Database into an XML File Using PHP

Backing up data is extremely important. Most of the time the database is the most important piece of the puzzle. Imagine losing all of the data in your database — it would be tragic. Here’s a PHP snippet that outputs your database as XML. Here is how the output will look like.

<database name="my_database">
	<table name="wp_comments">
		<columns>
			<column name="comment_ID" blob="0" maxlength="" multiple_key="0" not_null="1" numeric="1" primary_key="1" table="wp_comments" type="int" default="" unique_key="0" unsigned="1" zerofill="0" />
			<column name="comment_post_ID" blob="0" maxlength="" multiple_key="1" not_null="1" numeric="1" primary_key="0" table="wp_comments" type="int" default="" unique_key="0" unsigned="0" zerofill="0" />

Check out the demo here

14. Add Custom Google Search Results to Your Site with PHP

Learn how to integrate a custom google search results on your site, and style it to your liking.

15. Send Hassle Free and Dependable HTML Emails With PHP

A simple straightforward function that sends HTML e-mails with a plain text counterpart for those over 80 and still using AOL 2.5.

16. How to Validate Forms in both sides using PHP and jQuery

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to validate your forms using PHP and jQuery in both sides: client side (using javascript with jQuery) and server side (using PHP). It will be interesting to see how to use regular expressions to validate different kind of e-mails, passwords and more.

Check out the demo here

17. Create a shoutbox using PHP and AJAX (with jQuery)

how to create a dynamic ajax based shoutbox with jQuery from scratch. It will be very interesting to know how to use the ajax function of jQuery and how it can be used to insert and recover data from a MySQL database via PHP in a way asynchronous.

Check out the demo here

18. 3 ways to compress CSS files using PHP

When you’re using a sophisticated design, CSS files can quickly become very long, and takes time to load. Here are 3 interresting ways of compressing CSS files by using PHP.

19. Smart Image Resizer

The major advantage of this script is that it allows you to resize and crop any image on my website without touching the actual image or writing any code.

20. PHP Contact Form Script

This contact form will return a validation message if the message was sent succesfully. It will also display an error message if you try to send an empty message or if the e-mail is invalid.