Displaying an RSS feed with PHP

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Introduction

RDF Site Summary documents, or RSS, are an easy way to syndicate content onto your web site. More and more web sites are offering RSS feeds of their content that you can use to add substance to your own site.

RSS is an XML format that was designed by Netscape. Since their inception, RSS documents have gained wide popularity and are used by many major news portals and other web sites.

A Simple Web Search Engine

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Every user expects a search engine on any Web site they visit. Unfortunately, search engines are extremely complex to develop. They require massive amounts of resources and time to implement. Today I’ll show you how to use a MySQL (or any SQL database) to create your own basic search engine.

Note: Today’s Code Gallery Spotlight requires that an SQL-compliant database be installed (such as MySQL). If a SQL database is not available, you can download one from<http://www.mysql.com/>.

Spell Checking in PHP

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Introduction

Spell checking is a tool that many people cannot do without. However, it is rare to find such a useful extra when filling out a form on a Web page. Today you’ll learn how to use the PHP spell checking functions to create a robust spell checker that can be used just about anywhere.

The pspell/aspell PHP functions

PHP handles all of its spell-checking functionality through the use of the pspell/aspell libraries. These are available from Sourceforge at http://aspell.sourceforge.net/ andhttp://pspell.sourceforge.net/. With these libraries, PHP can:

How to Session Authentication

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Web site authentication applies to most Web sites on the Internet. Implementation of authentication schemes, however, can vary significantly from one site to another.

Why use session authentication?

Let’s say you run the Web site www.myneatstore.com and you want your customers to be authenticated with a username and password before they are allowed to make purchases. To accomplish this, you could use a number of methods (the most obvious of which is the HTTP authentication headers).

Creating PDF Files in PHP

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How dynamic PDFs can help you

When I found out that dynamic PDFs could be created in PHP, my first thought was: “That’s great, but what can dynamic PDF files actually do for me?” As far as I was concerned, PDF support was more trouble than it was worth.

However, as I started playing with the PDF support in PHP, I soon realized that there are all sorts of ways that I could use the PDF features of PHP to make my Web sites (and even my business) more efficient.