Working With Strings in .NET

During the course of this tutorial you will learn about the string class and many of the methods that it contains to make working with strings relatively easy, from converting the case of a string to finding out if it begins with, ends with or equals a specified value. Basic string formatting using the Format method and finding and extracting sub strings within a string are also covered. All the tasks typically associated with working with string data is covered such as copying, inserting, removing and replacing text in a string as well as how to clean white space from the ends of user input and working with string arrays.

PHP Custom Web Statistics – Part 4: graphing the statistics

In the final part of this article on creating custom web statistics using PHP and MySQL, we're going improve on the display of our custom web statistics by adding some graphs, which give an easy to read display showing the best and worst months of the year, or days of the month for example.

In this tutorial, we'll first give a brief overview of the GD image library, and how to check whether it’s installed, as well as how to install the library if its not already part of your PHP installation. Then we'll look the PHP image functions that are necessary to perform the various drawing operations used to create the dynamic graphs. Finally, we'll adapt the month.php and year.php pages to display custom graphs of the relevant hit data.

PHP/ CSS Image Gallery: Thumbnailing a Portion of an Image

In last week's article ("PHP/ CSS Searchable Image Gallery") we looked at how we could build an image gallery using PHP and MySQL and then display it with minimal effort by positioning the images on the page with CSS. Today we build an admin tool that allows you to define thumbnail images which we will link to the main image, but rather than blindly resize the thumbnail to within a set of specific size constraints, we will interactively provide you with a way of selecting a portion of the image to use as the thumbnail.

So, using this code you can interactively choose which area of a photo to use as a thumbnail, looking far more professional than presenting a tiny hard-to-see thumbnail of the whole picture. As an example, here are two seperate areas being selected as thumbnails, using the script provided and explained in this week's tutorial.

Please note that this article forms part of a chapter in the DMXzone e-book PHP Web Applications for Dreamweaver: Juicy Solutions for the Busy Developer.

ASP: Role-based User Authentication

We make a simple but scalable role based authentication system by storing the data in a normalized way allowing us to easily rebuild the data in the user's session, and  create a quick but logical way to query this data. We implement the ever-important security check, and make sure that the user is forced to log out when his/her permissions change.

Although this tutorial is not beginner-level, all the code is provided if you just want the solution without understanding how we got there!

PHP/ CSS Searchable Image Gallery

This tutorial teaches you how to build a dynamically generated Photo gallery. The database stores keywords against each photograph, and then user can search on those keywords and the resulting images are dusplayed, using PHP to query the database and CSS to present the page, and so avoiding tables and fixed numbers of columns.A basic admin system is also built up for you to put images into a database on your server.

This tutorial is suitable for intermediate-level Dreamweaver users, although no previous PHP knowledge is necessary.

Please note that this article forms part of a chapter in the DMXzone e-book PHP Web Applications for Dreamweaver: Juicy Solutions for the Busy Developer.

Sorting and Paging with a Repeater