Tag Archives: PHP

PHP development including industry news, security and sample code.

New website design trends

Update your website with latest trends.

This year has seen many new trends in website design, the updates in CSS3, JavaScript and Jquery along with some innovative designers and coders have seen sites get more engaging for the user. The sites that make use of social media to encourage their users to spread the word about their fantastic new websites will no doubt have benefited from increased awareness and sales as a result. Continue reading

Choosing between PHP and MySQL for quick jobs

I recently imported a database which included a selection of French postcodes. Because of a bug with the original export (received in a spreadhseet) some of the postcodes were missing the leading zeros, and some of them actually had more leading zero’s than were required.

Unfortunately the problem wasn’t raised until the data was imported, and a fresh import was going to take me hours. Fortunately all French postcodes are 5 characters long so it was possible to fix this problem programmatically. Continue reading

Writing secure form to email scripts with the PHP mail() function

Spammers all around the globe are profiting on a daily basis from poorly written form to email scripts. Scripts like this can be abused by spammers, who will inject new email headers into the form fields, effectively allowing them to send whatever message they want, to whomever they want, courtesy of your mail server. Once they find a vulnerable script page, they will mercilessly hit it with their spam robots and send as much spam as they can until your server inevitably keels over and dies, possibly taking your websites with it. Cue phone calls from lots of unhappy customers and a time-consuming mail queue clean-up job.

Continue reading