biorust.com Tutorials

Custom Error Messages
It is a fact of life that if you run a busy regularly-updated website you'll also move your files about quite often. Whilst this may not pose a problem for you initially, search engines take a while to process dead links, and during this time you may be losing visitors who go to your old pages and get the standard 'page not found' error. You can prevent this by customizing your error pages, sending your visitors instead to a nice formatted webpage that politely tells them to keep on looking using your new navigation structure.

An Expandable Form Validation Class: Part 3
In this final Part we will be coding some example validation rules and explaining how to use them. We will then go on and show how the final complete Class can be applied in a real working environment, so that you can use it in all your future scripts. At the end of this Part, you should have gained a complete understanding of how the Class operates, and proceed to expand on it with ease.

An Expandable Form Validation Class: Part 2
In Part 1 of this tutorial, we covered the basics of our Form Validation Class. We explained how the core of the Class depends on regular expressions and gave an insight regarding the keyword concept. We also explained how each keyword will have a corresponding Class Method so that we can easily extend the Class in the future to suit our needs. In Part 2, we will get our hands dirty in creating the remaining useful Class Methods that will instruct the Class which form fields to validate and how to validate them.

An Expandable Form Validation Class: Part 1
Learn how to create an expandable Form Validation Class, that once complete, you will able to use in any of your PHP scripts. The beauty of this Class is that it is expandable with ease. This means that once the base code of the Class is complete, you can easily configure it to validate different types of form data with virtually no changes. The extra configurations will only be limited to your programming knowledge.

Regular Expressions
One of PHPs most useful features is its string processing abilities. Feed PHP any string, and it can process it in any number of different ways with a multitude of different in-built functions. Finding letter occurrences, replacing certain words, limiting the number of characters, etc - it's all made very easy.

A Complete Membership System
In this multi-page article I'm going to show you how to set up the server side scripting for a complete membership system, including everything from registration, to changing your password, validation emails, etc.

Bypassing PHP 32 Bit Integer Bounds
Have you ever found yourself attempting to calculate a very large number but found you were getting inaccurate results because PHP could not handle it and was returning a float instead of an integer?

Absolutely Positioned Ads
The best areas to place advertising can vary from page to page and it depends on the type of content and layout you have. But one element that all websites have in common is a header and it's the first thing that visitors usually see. For that reason, it's a great spot to place advertisements.If you're following the new trend to lay out your site with CSS, you're not using tables. So how do you position the ad in a specific area? Let's learn how to absolutely position an ad!

Improved CSS Hover Images
You see a lot of hover effects on web nowadays. When you hover your mouse cursor over a link it usually changes to something else - It doesn't matter if the link is an image or just text, there's usually some sort of hover effect in place. If it's a graphical link the hover effect is usually another image displaying the hover effect. This image is often preloaded on page load so that the user sees the effect right away, but there's also another way to do it. How about using just one image and changing its state/position it with CSS?

Restricting External Access to .PHP Files
Sometimes, when you are writing your PHP script, you'll write Classes and Functions that you will use in your script in external files so that they might be included( ) or required( ) at any time. The same could be said about configuration files - You have certain settings in the form of variables in a external configuration file that you load in the different pages of your script so that they might be shared and edited with ease.

An Introduction to the GD Library
Are you getting bored with standard PHP functions? Do you want to venture into additional libraries of PHP code? If so, GD is an additional module that allows the programmer to develop graphics using PHP. Cool huh? You can do things from drawing lines, to adjusting contrast, to anti-aliasing.

The Complete Shoutbox Tutorial
Now that you know the basics of PHP and MySQL connectivity, its time to add a little interaction with this cool little applet that allows your users to leave short messages - a system commonly referred to as a shoutbox. In this tutorial I will detail everything you need to know about making your very own shoutbox, right down from the HTML form, to the smilie emoticon configuration and anti-spam measures.

Alternating Row Colors
Now that you've got yourself a snazzy new mySQL back-ended page you might want to spruce it up a little with alternating row colors. This is fair enough, as they definitely make tables look a lot more interesting provided the colours work well with each other, but since I'm not here to explain colour relationships I'll just use a series of different greys throughout my example code. This tutorial is not made for the average novice, and is probably placed closer to intermediate skill capability if you want to explore more advanced colour combinations.

MySQL Query Limiting
Combining the power of a mySQL database with the flexibility of PHP allows even the most amateurish developer to create websites loaded with thousands of pages of information. But what do you do if you don't want to display all your QUERY data in one large lump?

Using mod_rewrite with Apache and PHP
This tutorial assumes that the reader has no prior knowledge of working neither with the Apache Configuration file, HTACCESS file, nor with mod_rewrite in general. It will go through a simple step-by-step process on how to successfully setup mod_rewrite to work on your web server.

Basic mySQL Queries And PHP
This tutorial will help you get started in working with mySQL and PHP. It will assume that you have no prior experience in using mySQL with PHP before. After reading this tutorial, you should get an idea on what a database is, how to use it, and how to access it. You can then go ahead and start reading on the many more advanced topics regarding database systems.

Dumping mySQL Tables to HTML
In this tutorial we are going to expose basic mySQL queries, and how they can be used to print all data from a mySQL table into an HTML table.

Text & Number Functions
This tutorial covers various different text manipulation and management functions, many of which are absolutely invaluable for your scripts.

Logical Operators
This tutorial is aimed at beginner PHP developers who want to learn how to use the PHP's in-built logical operators.

A Simple Quiz Script
ASP is a very simple language if you know its syntax (in that way, it is much like every other programming language, albeit in ASP's case a bit more forgiving than some others). This tutorial describes the construction of a very simple ASP quiz script, which works with just two files: quiz.asp and data.asp.