ASP.NET User Controls

Chris explains the vision and the advantages of ASP.NET user controls - write once, use anywhere routines that modularise your development and helps seperate the back-end development team's work from the front-end 'design' work.

The example built up in this tutorial will prove very useful to over-worked developers; an ASP.NET user control that can be used on every page in a site to insert a rotating advertisment header (sourced from an XMLfile) and a copyright notice footer. The source code can be freely adapted and used in your own sites.

Idea to implementation: Password protect the Admin site and Use PHP Upload

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.

PHP Regular Expressions Made Easy .. well, easier.

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.

PHP advanced text functions: These are a few of my favourite strings

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.

Dreamweaver MX and PHP Recordsets explained

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.