Ever feel as though your copy-paste buttons are going to wear out because your form has 36 fields, and ALL that data has to be scrubbed clean and fully sanitized prior to database entry?  I feel your pain.  Actually, to be fair- I’ve felt your pain, but not anymore! Why do we need to sanitize and clean user input?  Because we can’t trust all users! Thanks to PHP’s handy ability to reference user created functions, […]

It’s often handy to refer to Gmail’s “00:00 (4 minutes ago)” example as an additional feature of usability for web users.  By creating an effective time-ago function using PHP, we can effectively format most MySQL dates, datetime, and timestamp entries into an easier to read and comprehend “Sometime ago” outputs. Besides, who really wants to have to read a date anymore?! Accepted MySQL Dates As MySQL is capable of storing dates and datetimes in a […]

Before getting too far into posting tips and tricks for some of the more advanced functions and operations that can be completed using PHP, I thought it may be helpful to provide a bit of instruction on how to set up a simple, quick, easy localhost development environment for testing. Preliminary disclosure: I am a Macintosh user, so instructions provided for setup on Windows are from third parties! Using Macintosh: For this setup, we’ll be using […]