You've been slaving away on a personal site, or maybe a band's website, and they say that they want a good, solid guestbook to allow the site's visitors to "talk back" to the you or the band. What's the easiest way to get this worked in? Well, using SOC (Somone Else's Code), of course! And, in this latest article from DevShed, they show you how to use one of the better PHP-based guestbooks out there, patGuestbook.

The patGuestbook is described as: a PHP-based application described, in the author's words, as "a versatile guestbook with a wealth of configuration options". Developed by Stephan Schmidt, it is freely available for download and is packaged as a single PHP class which can be easily included in your application.

In this article, they give you all the steps you'll need to take to create the database, install the scripts, and administer the guestbook (yes, it comes with an admin script). From, there, it's just a matter of customizing the application to work inside your site and make it all seemless.