20 Useful PHP Components & Tutorials for Everyday Project
- Posted in PHP
- 65 Comments »
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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" />
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.
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.
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.
21. PHP & jQuery image upload and crop v1.2
This PHP script will allow you to upload a JPG image, resize it if required then crop it to given height and width.

















WOW this is really an amazing post! I’m a complete beginner on PHP/MySQL these tutorials would really help a lot. Thanks for sharing!
Hope to see some of these come out as Wordpress plugins. Good list.
For charting, I have found that LibChart (http://naku.dohcrew.com/libchart/pages/introduction/) is much simpler to use.
Thanks for the list
Awesome!!
Hope to see some of these come out as Wordpress plugins. Good list.
Nice collection :D
This night this page had a weird layout
thanks man..
it’s superb..
very – very superb! if u never bookmark this page, you will be lose ;-)
Very detailed and well laid out, as per usual.
Now if my little brain could only apply your info, I would be set:) I must admit, without any post secondary training in any component of web design, it is tuff to learn on my own. Is there a tool for writing php? i.e. there are plenty of html editors (so one doesn’t need to know everything about html).
Thanks Noupe!
Jeromy (aka hillbilly)
Eclipse w/PDT or Zend IDE
You can use a lot of editors for php. Lightweight is Programmers Notepad [free] and Kommodo [has ftp functionality embedded]. Btw great-post post beginers.
Excelente recopilacion, gracias!.
Very useful indeed. One can create a login UI with validations, strength meter and using mysql with this list.
Great .. very useful … thanks for making this list
Algunas cosas muy interesantes
I have to probe all these solutions.
Awesome!!!
Excellent list, especially the dynamic image resizer!
Awesome post! But one thing is missing – some newsletters scripts.
Awesome post! But one thing is missing – some newsletters scripts.
Wrong link posted on the last example.
Hi,
I have been following your posts for long and have found them really great.
Thank you.
This is a very cool list, but a lot of people still use plain text for e-mail. Ever try to load a huge mail from tickcetmaster, livenation, or jinx on a cell phone? :)
Great tutorial, like to see the ajax image/upload crop on wordpress. This will be an awesome plugin!!
Great list, well worth bookmarking for the future. Thanks!
Really nice post, thanks!
great post
wow..this is very useful for me..
thank u..
cool links . thanks !!
Thanks for this great list
Thanks for such a useful list, this gonna very helpful to me…
better be careful with what you use, on online business that has commercial transactions enabled needs to be outsourced to a professional , of course that’s just my opinion. you can always create your wish list using these resources for your developer…
Great Job, I see at least 3 I will be using in the near future.
Thanks for password strength meter solution. Very usefull.
Regards.
Seriously useful stuff here.
Appears to me that the pChart project is dead. The frequent updates that were are no more. And the charts themselves are pretty bugged (added pChart to my project, and bit sorry about it.)
great links, i really like that email validation :)
Reddit style voting is quite good
I guess $result = mysql_query($result,$link) is supposed to be $result = mysql_query($query,$link), right?
thank you!
Great Post Thanks
I am learning php now and have been wondering how so much of what is listed is done! Glad I stumbled here! Thanks!
hope I could learn this..
can anybody teach me how to do this..?
Great resource. Thanks
Hi,
This is very useful article to jazz up the skill in PHP language. We also wrote a few posts that gives in depth idea about PhP. Please, feel free to take a look of the above Blog URL and have your feedback.
Thank you,
Dip
SERIOUSLY, VERY HAPPY!
When I open this site..Whoah! It’s really good for beginner like me..keep up a good work guys. Thanks for every posts.
this is wonderful tutorial .. i read it 3 times and get a fantastic results and sure i put a
copy of this lesson on my site here
These are some great tutorials… thanks!
thanks for all this ..
right and usefull
Great list. Thank you!
Great post thanks
The title says 20 tutorials, but there are 21 tutorials :)
i don’t care what is the tutorial is that …but one person she got comments is soo cute…whatever..
Great list, number 7 is what I was looking for :))