New from PHPBuilder.com is an article that will show you how to provide a HTML styled select or drop-down list of selections the user can make where PHP builds a variable that holds a select option list. What exactly does this mean? Well, read on to find out...

Basically, the idea in this piece is the creation of Javascript arrays from the values in your database (fetched with PHP), and the interaction of two different browser windows. In their example, they pop open a new window to allow the user to select a contact, then send it back to the main page. The Javascript in the popup posts it back to the parent which, in turn, refreshes to get the data for that contact.

Handy little tricks like this one can not only make things flow more smoothly on your site, but it helps to provide simple and clean interfaces between user inputted data and your database information.