In this article, Matt continues his write up of his brief to build an artists' portfolio site. The customer requires an administration area of the site to upload, delete and rename images that are displayed on the front-end of the system. Matt teaches you how to build a password protected admin area using PHP and MySQL, and teaches you how to use the PHP Upload Extension to allow uploading and management of the image files.

Regular Expressions often crop up on people's list of programming stumbling blocks. Whether in PHP, JavaScript or Visual Basic, their power for searching and replacing is eclipsed only by the user-unfriendliness of the syntax.

In this tutorial, Allan demonstrates the use and the syntax of Regular Expressions via the familiar interface of the Dreamweaver MX Find and Replace dialogue box, builds up a list of the must useful RegEx syntax and then applies in his Dreamweaver code.

In this tutorial we look at the things that PHP can do with string variables, investigating how we can search for bits of a string, grab specific pieces out of a string and how we can split a string up into smaller bits - vital functionality if you are coding a function to manually parse a CVS file, for example.

This article is suitable for beginners to intermediate level Dreamweaver MX PHP users, but we work with some PHP functions that aren't exposed through the Dreamweaver MX environment and so will be hand coding most of the examples.

In this tutorial, we delve under the covers of Dreamweaver MX, and look at how the PHP Recordsets actually work.

Many times in the Macromedia Dreamweaver MX forums there are questions on how to connect to a MySQL database, and how to work with Recordsets, so we're going to look at them in depth and explain how to use values from a recordset in your own code.

Knowing how the Dreamweaver MX generated code works is the first step to hand coding, and allows you to break down the constraints imposed by the Server Behaviors, and create more complex functionality for your websites.

Many budding pro web designers don't consider the client after-care that seperates the professionals from the wannabes. Allowing a client to administer the site themselves, without having to call you up and wait for amends, might seem like a way to deny yourself money -  but it gains you the all-important goodwill that you need in this competitive industry.

Using Dreamweaver and PHP, Matt shows you how you to make an admin site so that your clients can add, delete or amend content by themselves, without having to edit the HTML themselves or call you up to make minor site amends. This tutorial is suitable for intermediate level DW PHP developers (or beginners who read his last article)

In today's article we continue with our gentle introduction to the underlying code in your Dreamweaver MX crafted PHP pages. This time we'll be looking at how you can use PHP to format text variables and text returned from your database queries. We'll see what the PHP functions are, how they are used and how to implement them in both raw PHP code as well as through the Dreamweaver IDE.

In this article for PHP beginners, Allan takes you through the language’s control structures and constructs. These are the building blocks of a scripting language and allow it to make ‘decisions’ or repeat irms of code, unlike HTML which just renders top to bottom. After reading this, and attaching the supplied cheat sheet to your computer monitor, you’ll have the fundamental building blocks of the language at your command.

In this tutorial, we look at using files in PHP. In the first part of this article, we are going to look at how to get a directory listing of all the files and directories at a specified path on your web server.

We then move on to looking at how to write text files on the server, in csv format so they can easily be used in the many applications that can read csv (Comma Seperated Value) files, and how to dump the contents of a Dreamweaver MX recordset to a csv file.

Next we look at reading back existing csv files, and storing the data in an array so that it's easy to work with it. Finally we close the article by looking at some other file related commands, such as using unlink() to delete a file.

In this standalone tutorial, Matt supplies the CSS and layout that he built in previous articles, and shows you how to add database connectivity using My SQL and PHP - ideal for beginners to dynamic databases and server-side functionality.

This tutorial covers creating an advanced search form.  In building the form up from one where the criteria covers a single field in the database to one where we can search for specific values within any or all of the fields in our database, we'll cover creating recordsets, adding parameters to them and modifying the recordset behavior code in Code View to provide both AND and OR queries to our recordset.

In this article, we look at the concept of inheritance, and see how you can create a class which extends another class. This is an excellent way of making your code more readable, more modular, easier to debug and quicker to develop.

We then look at how the data from a class can easily be stored, so an exact copy of the class complete with all its data can be reconstructed at a later date.

While Dreamweaver MX is a powerful application for visually creating your web pages, you will, before long, find that you get stuck into the PHP code. In this, the first in a series of articles that looks at the PHP language, we kick off with a look at the basics of how the language works and find out about variables and variable types.