php grab bag: more stepping stones for project X

Here’s one that we’ve come across before, and used before, and yet we had to learn this little business again: addslashes(). Use addslashes when you want your forms to take in whatever a user inputs to your forms. We used this previously to help thwart hacker attacks — using addslashes prevents users from inputting SQL code into your forms and screwing up your databases. Anyway, Harry Feucks makes a strong point about using addslashes vs. magic quotes.

We used a handy bit of a hack from A List Apart for aligning a form without tables, aligning a form with CSS using cross-floats and such.

We found some offhand PHP tutorials at tizag helpful this time around. They have an interesting argument for ASP v. PHP, though we have used both and find PHP to be perfectly great and robust for any size project. We also found their MySQL tutorials helpful as well.

Lastly, we have had some code examples from PHP freaks on our desktop for a while. We haven;t tried any of them, but we wanted to make sure they were noted before the links went away. There is their PHP hit counter. Their expanding and collapsing menus look interested (and might be helpful in another project where Eric Meyer’s menus don;t seem to be cutting the muster). And then there is their PHP calendar, though we have been loving PHP iCalendar (except for a few small bits we’d rather not get into right now).