If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

On modern websites (to avoid the use of that ‘2.something’ word) tag clouds are often a feature that is found. Now to follow in the modern spirit tag clouds should be used to let the users contribute content.

Of course, this can be a good thing or bad thing. How do you prevent users from just spamming the tag clouds with unrelated keywords just to draw attention to their content?

One way is to have the categorization of content defined by the site owners themselves. Of course that can remove some of the feeling of control that these modern websites give to users.

So what do you do?

There is a PHP class that will easily allow you to create automatic tag clouds for your site. This class, written by Ver Pangonilo from the Philippines, is a great resource for helping you still allow the users content determine the tag clouds for your site.

The PHP class analyzes the content text and will suggest keywords based on the frequency of one or multiple words. You provide the parameters you want to filter by:

• minimum word length
• minimum times the word appears
• minimum length and occurances of words for 2, and 3 word phrases
• minimum length and occurances of 2 and 3 word phrases

Check it out.

This fairly new PHP class has an Ajax based interface and is used for AntiSpam Feedback forms.

The class can be used to validate the e-mail address that users enter in your feedback form before accepting the submission. It makes things a little more tedious for uses as it sends an e-mail to the user submitting the form with a special code in a link. Basically, it requires your user to validate their e-mail address before letting the form data be sent.

A small problem I see is that if the user doesn’t validate their e-mail within 1 day, the info is deleted. It’s not a route I would personally take, however if you are getting bombarded by spam coming from your form it may be for you.

Here’s an extra tip… If you are getting bombarded by spam coming from your form you better check to be sure that your form is secure and not allowing someone to hijack it to send spam from your domain. Your host wouldn’t be very happy about that!

Like I said in my last post, today is not a “jump on Google” day at all. To prove it, here is a great PHP tutorial that will show you how to create a dynamic navigation menu.

Why is this important? Because creating a dynamic nested unordered list without javascript can sometime be a problem. Why you ask? Because the script needs to “remember” the values, sub values and also the query string from previous clicked links.

This tutorial will teach you how to create a dynamic navigation menu powered by PHP and MySQL only. Since the tutorial uses standard HTML lists (unordered) adding CSS styles to modify the look is easily done.

Enjoy!