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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!

This a fairly new script (commercial - $25) out for OsCommerce users. Ajax Search Suggest for OsCommerce adds a nice pop-out suggestions box (sort of like Google) to your usual search box.

A few features…

• Search is performed while customer types in the product using first letters
• The customers typing will be ‘auto-completed’ with symbols of the first founded occurrence
• The first found letter occurrences will be highlighted with bold
• The dropdown pop-out is scrollable but only if search match exceeds the pop-out window
• Key recognition is available, press up, down or ‘enter’ inside the suggest dropdown
• Multi language support
• Works in all modern browsers

Remember this is a commercial script. I am not affiliated with this company at all, I just thought it may be a helpful add-on for those using OsCommmerce.