Over at roScripts there is a nice tutorial explaining how to modify my FormBuilder PHP class so that validation is performed unobtrusively using AJAX. Check it out.

When I started out as a web designer, content management systems belonged strictly to the realm of big budget websites. For everyone else, it was perfectly normal for a web designer to manually update a site whenever a change needed to be made. Clients didn’t expect a CMS to be included with their website, and web designers didn’t offer the option. Times have certainly changed, and in an age of blogs, Facebook, and MySpace, clients expect to be able to take control of their website’s content.

For most web designers, especially those who work solo, a custom built content management system is still a tall order. Fortunately there are numerous commercial and open source content management systems available, which offer a practical and affordable means of wrangling content. However, a “one size fits all” content management system that doesn’t address a site’s specific content requirements can introduce as many problems as it solves.

I have made another update to my FormBuilder class. Version 1.4 features a new function, emailResults, which can be used to automatically send the user-submitted form variables to any email address. A number of readers asked for this functionality, which eliminates the need to write your own form processing routine. Have fun!

One of the great benefits of PHP is that it is quick and easy for non-programmers to learn the basics of the language and begin to add server-side logic to their websites. This simplicity is a double edged sword, as many novice programmers are unaware of PHP’s security vulnerabilities and inadvertently create web applications that are an easy target for hackers and spammers. Most PHP security holes are well documented, but a newer and lesser known vulnerability is header injection, a cunning exploit whereby a spammer hijacks a website’s contact form and uses it to send bulk unsolicited email.

Last week I was putting the finishing touches on a small website I created for a friend. Specifically, I was jazzing up the image gallery with an ‘Image loading…’ animation, so that visitors knew to hang around while a new image loaded. In the process I made an interesting discovery about the way Safari (Safari 1.2 at any rate) handles javascript image source swapping.

It strikes me as odd that the uptake of PHP5 has been so slow. The snail’s pace at which web hosts are migrating to PHP5 has been hampered not by lack of user interest, but because a few popular PHP applications (OSCommerce, for one) break under PHP5. In this respect, I suppose the web host’s hands are tied.