20 New & Useful PHP Techniques & Tutorials

PHP is the most popular and widely accepted server side scripting language among developers due to its easy to learn nature, free of cost and its large ever increasing helpful community. Here are 25 useful PHP techniques and tutorials, most of which have been published only in this year.

1. Facebook type image rotation and more using PHP and Javascript

How does facebook rotate images in gallery. Here’s a nice solution using the inbuilt imagerotate functionality in PHP. View Demo »

2. Retrieve Google Analytics Visits and Pageviews with PHP

Learn how to integrate Google Analytics data into your website using an easy to use PHP API  View Demo »

3. Caching Dynamic PHP pages easily

Learn how to cache database intensive heavy pages and serve the static html cached files utilizing the output buffering in PHP

4. Reading Excel Sheet in PHP

In this article you will learn, how you can read Microsoft Excel Sheet in PHP using Open Source Tool PHPExcelReader.

5. XML Parsing in PHP/XPath Way

If you are a PHP developer, you surely must have done XML parsing at some stage or the other. Parsing XML using XPath is far more better than other techniques, not only because it’s quite simple but also because it’s extendable.

6. Retrieve Your Gmail Emails Using PHP and IMAP

Grabbing emails from your Gmail account using PHP is probably easier than you think. Armed with PHP and its IMAP extension, you can retrieve emails from your Gmail account in no time. View Demo »

7. 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 are looking for.

8. Automatic Face Detection in Photos with PHP

Find out how to automatically detect and tag a face in an image.

9. Update Twitter using Command Line, Javascript, Or PHP.

Everyone seems to be all about Twitter so here’s some simple examples of how to update your Twitter status from a command line prompt, web server or simple html web site.

10. Making RESTful Requests in PHP

APIs have become a very commonplace part of many popular web sites and services, especially REST APIs. This article discusses how to get, post, put and delete with a REST API in PHP.

11. PHP Multithreading using CURL

Simultaneously fetch data from multiple websites using CURL’s multithreading option.

12. PHP HTTP Authentication

At times, you may wish to make certain pages of your site only viewable to a select few, you can do this by using PHP’s built in HTTP Authentication.

13. PHP copy directory from source to destination

To copy a directory source to a destination directory you will need to scan the source directory with all files and directory and copy to the destination. To accomplish this we should make a recursive function that will copy the files from source to target dir.

14. File Upload in PHP – Securing the things

Secure your file upload forms and prevent malicious users from attacking your web app.

15. HTML Scraper in PHP

Sometimes we want to extract the HTML content of the remote website page, this technique is called as HTML scraper. This article will discuss on how we can extract the HTML content of the remote webpage.

16. PHP Secure Login Tips and Tricks

In this article, you will get a list of PHP secure login tips and tricks that will definitely help you decide on your secure rating of your login page.

17. Use PHP To Gzip CSS Files

This technique is a powerful and simple way to reduce page download size and speed up your site that will work with most PHP installations

18. Backup Your Database into an XML File Using PHP

The database is the most important part of a web application. Imagine losing all of the data in your database — it would be tragic. Here’s a PHP snippet that outputs your database as XML.

19. How To Debug in PHP

This article breaks down the fundamentals of debugging in PHP, helps you understand PHP’s error messages and introduces you to some useful tools to help make the process a little less painful.

20. Optimizing a php application in 5 minutes

Optimizing means reducing loading and execution times, improving the user experience by making the application reacting more responsively. If your language of choice is php, fortunately this process takes only 5 minutes.