In this new tutorial Smashing Magazine shows you how to create a mini "Christmas List" application with PHP, HTML and CSS (and a little bit of database help) to display a list of what you or your family wants this holiday.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and how much jollier could we make it than with a helpful Christmas wish list crafted for your family to ensure that you get maximum presentage this holiday? In this article, we will focus on creating a very simple system that allows you to add gift ideas to a Web page, and for your family (or whoever) to view the list.

They walk you through the setup of the basic PHP file structure, the HTML template for the list output, CSS to make it look nice and the actual PHP backend - working with a MySQL database to pull out product information and use a simple login method.

A new post on CodeForest.net today gives you a technique for obfuscating email addresses with a combination of PHP, CSS and Javascript. It uses ROT13 for the obfuscation and some tricky CSS to keep it usable for the human visitors.

According to Wikipedia, more than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted. That's around 200 billion spam messages per day. To keep this insane amount of spam out of your inbox, you should keep your e-mail safe when you display it on web. One of the ways to keep it safe is to obfuscate it. In this tutorial I'll show you how to create a script that will do just that.

The script converts the email address into a ROT13 obfuscated versions and reverse it. The spam bots harvesting addresses won't see it as a valid format but the user, thanks to some CSS rules, will see it and be able to copy it easily. Each part of the script is explained in the post and you can see a demo of it in action here.

Script-Tutorials.com has a new article posted today showing you how to combine PHP, some CSS, a dash of SQL and some HTML (oh, and jQuery) to create your own commenting system from scratch that could be used anywhere from a simple blog to a more complex social site.

Today I prepared new interesting article - I will tell how you can create own commenting system (AJAX) for your items (any units at your website) with PHP. For our demonstration - I prepared two SQL tables: first table will keep records of our items. It contain several fields: title, description, time of adding and comments count. Another table will keep records of comments. We will use jQuery too (for better interface behavior). One of features will spam protection (we can post no more than one comment every 10 minutes)!

The tutorial includes all of the code, markup and styling you'll need to make the system work. If you'd like to get right into the code you can download it as a package or you can try out their demo.

In a new post Bertrand Mansion shows how he combined the versatility of the PEAR QuickForm2 package and the Bootstrap project from Twitter to quickly make a form using the project's styling (CSS).

I don't know about you, but for me building HTML Forms and styling HTML Forms are maybe the most boring things in web development. It's repetitive and takes a lot of time to do things correctly. That's why tools like Twitter's Bootstrap and PEAR's HTML_QuickForm2 can help with this part of our job. Wouldn't it be nice to have QuickForm2 generate a markup compatible with Bootstrap CSS, so that you could get a nice looking form without to much efforts? Well, that's what I plan to do here.

He starts by creating a simple QuickForm2 form with no renderers attached (no pre-defined styles) and a custom render callback that wraps the items in "div" tags with the correct styles. There's also a custom renderer included for grouping items with additional styling attached.

From Superdit.com there's a tutorial showing you how to display search results in an ExtJS grid as pulled from Google's API. The article's from the beginning of the year, but it's a good self-contained example of using ExtJS to automatically pull in data produced from the backend.

This time I want to make a simple example in displaying google web search result in ExtJS grid, other ExtJS component that can be used to displaying this result is dataview, but grid is more common in displaying data in ExtJS.

The code (downloadable here) is pretty simple and the full CSS, Javascript, PHP and markup you'll need are included. The PHP pulls the results from the Google API and

On DZone.com today Giorgio Sironi introduces you to Assetic, an asset management tool that helps you keep things organized and easily requested by your application.

Assetic is a PHP library for managing the deployment of your assets: JavaScript, CSS and other resources which will be requested by the browser. The library has been created by Kris Wallsmith from OpenSky, an e-shop where many of the active members of the PHP community work, or worked (see Jonathan Wage/Doctrine 1 and Bulat Shakirzyanov/Imagine.)

Giorgio compares it to the more traditional method (putting them in a public folder) and how Assetic gives you an advantage over this setup. The main feature of the tool is to bundle all of your assets into one file that is then sent to the browser and interpreted there reducing the need for HTTP calls to request multiple files. An example is included showing the creation of an asset collection and the output of the files all combined into one string.

Sander Marechal has been working with Phing in some of his recent development and has created something useful for compressing Javascript and CSS files on the deployment of your application - a YuiCompressor task.

I am going to write several useful extensions, the first of which is a YuiCompressorFilter. Phing already has support for a JavaScrip minifier in the form of the JsMinTask, but the yui-compressor is more useful. Not only does it usually compress better than JsMin, it can also compress CSS files. Also, because my YuiCompressor extension is implemented as a filter instead of a task you can do fancy things like minifying and concatenating files in a single step.

He includes both a sample of the task and it's configuration (the XML) in the post as well as a link to its source over on github.

In a new screencast from NetTuts.com today they show you how to integrate the popular Compass CSS authoring framework into an existing CodeIgniter-based application.

I was recently asked about how to use Compass in an existing CodeIgniter project. It seems that the emailer was under the impression that Compass was made for Ruby and Rails. But that's not the case at all! Note that Ruby will need to be installed on your system in order for Compass to work correctly.

The screencast (coming in at a quick five minutes) shows you how to get things set up and includes a walk-through of the generator application and the output it gives.

On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore has posted a tutorial showing you how to use the PEAR HTML_Table component to quickly and easily display tabular information on your site.

Because the task [of building tables] is so commonplace, personally I prefer to treat it like stamping out a widget, and rely on a drop in solution. While several such standardized solutions are available, I generally prefer to use HTML_Table, a great PEAR package which makes tabular data presentation a breeze. In this tutorial I'll walk you through several of HTML_Table's key features, additionally showing you how to integrate CSS and jQuery to create an eye-appealing and interactive tabular layout in no-time flat.

He helps you through the install (using the PEAR installer) and starts you down the right path with some sample code creating a table based off some example data from an array. He shows how to add headers, put in some CSS for styling them and for making the rows highlight on mouseover. He finishes it with the jQuery bit that uses the tablesorter feature to dynamically allow sorting of the table based on the values in each column.

New from the Script-Tutorials.com site there's a guide to getting a modern looking animated login system working on your PHP application. It uses jQuery to do some of the "modern" bits when the user logs in.

Today we will continue PHP lessons, and our article will about creating modern php login system. Possible you already saw similar ways to display login forms, and today we will repeat this by self. In result - it will some small element in your page layout, and after clicking on it - will appear some area, where we will see some welcome message, login form and another useful information. All very user friendly. So, its time to try demo.

You can start with the live demo or grabbing the code in a package to investigate or you can follow along in the post - full code and styling are provided.