PHPDeveloper.org http://www.phpdeveloper.org Up-to-the Minute PHP News, views and community en-us Sat, 18 May 2013 23:07:59 -0500 30 <![CDATA[BarelyFitz.com: CSS Colors - Take Control Using PHP]]> http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5497 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5497 On BarelyFitz Designs, there's a handy tutorial that's been posted to help developers out there combine the powers of PHP and CSS to form a sort of color management system for their site.

While many web sites use powerful programming environments to create HTML, these same tools are usually ignored when it comes to creating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This article describes how to take control of your colors in CSS using PHP. You will learn how to:
  • Centralize your color definitions using variables.
  • Separate presentation and content by referring to colors using abstract names such as base and highlight.
  • Automatically generate a color gradient from a single base color:
  • Automatically adjust the contrast of foreground colors so they can viewed on top of your background colors

They follow the steps to making a CSS file with PHP - generate the header and output the CSS - as well as examples of its usage. They create a range of colors based around a central one, five levels in either direction. The file they've created to accomplish this is also available for download.

]]> Fri, 02 Jun 2006 06:16:07 -0500 <![CDATA[PHPBuilder.com: Visual Verification in PHP]]> http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4926 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/4926 this article from PHPBuilder.com they take a look at how to integrate a "visual verification" system into your web forms to prevent spammers (CAPTCHA).

Many topics on the discussion forums deal with the verification of form data. Often it is checked to determine whether or not the submission is from a user or from a "bot", if the email address entered is a valid address, or if all the information that is required has been entered into the form.

While it's fairly easy to check to see if a form field is empty, determining if the posted information came from a real human is another task altogether. Most forms now include image verification for just this reason. This article will demonstrate how to create a simplified image verification system.

They walk you through the code, explainign each step of the way. They start with the creation of a random string, background, and font color for the CAPTCHA image to use. It's flexible enough to make either a string or just a word, too. Once the string is made, they set up the image to be written to and push each letter into it, rotating it to make it that much more difficult for scripts to try to understand its contents.]]> Fri, 03 Mar 2006 06:46:42 -0600