Since I’m largely self-taught in all things webdesign, PHP can be both frustrating and magical, a box full of wondrous tools I know neither the origin nor the use of. If you’re a newbie developer like me (or even if you’re somewhat familiar with PHP), you’d be surprised how much PHP can accomplish for your website these days:

Collecting Feedback

This article at CodeTricks.com explains how to make a really simple feedback form, which emails you comments and questions that people have submitted. (This tutorial covers both the HTML form part and the PHP part, so I find it VERY informative!)

Displaying Thumbnail Photos in a Gallery

Nettuts’ article covers one way to easily display photo thumbnails with a few lines of PHP code–much better than having to host your photos on another site, or worse, making an HTML table for your images and resizing all your images yourself. (Been there, done that :P) Scroll down to #12 on Nettuts’ article to find out more!

Making Easy Site Templates

This PHP article at About.com shows you how to use a PHP header and footer to create a site template, which you can change easily by editing the content of just those two files. (I use this trick on almost all my sites–it makes my webdesigning life SO much easier!)

Automatically Sending Mail to a Mailing List

Nettuts also covers how to use PHP to send mail to a specific list of people–who knew there was such an easy way to automate it? (Just scroll down to #8 on their article to see more on how to code this.)

Redirecting Your Visitors to Your New Page

Need to redirect your users to your new page without requiring them to click another link? Over at About.com, they show you how to use just a line or two of PHP code on a mostly-empty page to get it done! (I had no idea it was this easy! WOW…)

Creating Your Own Content Management System

This post at CSS-Tricks.com shows you how to set up a MySQL database, make a specific table for posts within that database, make a simple submission form so you can add posts, and display posts using PHP on a webpage. Basically, it shows you how to beat blogging websites at their own game! (Can be a little technical in parts, but it has links to other articles for extra explanation)

Summary

Can you believe PHP can handle all this–and more? I sure didn’t, until I did research for this blog post and realized just how much PHP can help us webmasters with our tasks. Try implementing one or more of these techniques for your site, and see how much time it can save you!