On Codewalkers.com this morning, there's a new tutorial written to be an introduction to working with text files in PHP.

When you have an idea to design a website that has the ability to handle data inside it, normally you start off the project planning the database type, database structure, etc. [...] If you are dealing with information of a reasonable amount of volume, such as, information of registered members in your site, you'll need a database. But, there will be situations where you need to know how to work with text files and get use of them.

He goes on to show some of the basic things PHP can do with text files - opening, writing to, reading from, and deleting a text file. The example he gives shows the user how to take in a form variable and add it to the end of a file using the filesystem functions.