For the vast majority of modern websites, advertising is a major source of revenue. Banner ads for services related to the web site owner’s industry allow customers to view products that tie into the site owner’s core business. In exchange, the web site owner can charge the banner ad owner for every impression (banner ad appearance) or click-through (when a user clicks the banner ad). In order to build a banner ad management system, we must first create the database tables that will hold the ad information,...
MySQL stored procedure's come in really handy at times. I like to let the database do the work for me sometimes. For example, in an e-commerce system you may need to calculate a tax. For our example today though, we will use the tables we made in my previous article on the XREF table. We are going to focus this tutorial on getting the appropriate tables in place to preform our history logging. To start, we are going to create a module's table so that our history table can be one table instead of many and we are...
The XREF, or cross reference table, is a database table that links records together. These tables are very good for normalization in your database. I almost always use an xref when I need an many to many relationship. Usually XREF tables have only two columns with no Primary Key. That's right, the two columns together make them unique. They are both Foreign Keys to other tables. A real life example of this would be in any standard CRM. Let's go over this example right now. Many CRM's could have a table to store...
User surveys can be an extremely effective marketing tool for any business web site. Visitors can make their voices heard on what products, services and information they would like the site to provide. Site owners can then adjust their marketing plans and promotions around the results of these polls. In order to build a basic user poll, we must first create the database tables that will hold the poll question and its various responses. Create the MySQL Polls Table ... First, we must build a database table...
You’re may be wondering what exactly CRUD is. CRUD simply stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete and it is the one of the fundamental principles of programming logic that can be expanded and applied to larger projects. For example, let’s imagine we’re creating a social network and we like to have the ability for users to create accounts, edit and update information for those accounts and also delete said accounts; that is CRUD at work. Now let’s get started using PHP & MySQL, to...
A SQL injection is a common programming error the consequences of which can be really devastating. Many successful hacking attacks start when a hacker discovers a vulnerability that gives an opportunity to inject SQL code. When an SQL injection occurs, the structure of an SQL query is compromised and as a result you are left at the mercy of the potential hackers. If there is a vulnerability found, hackers can exploit it to gain access not only to your site and database but in extreme cases also to your corporate...
There are times when we are so anxious to jump into creating something new that we forget to cover the basics. For web developers it is important, actually vital, to have the ability to test your projects locally before they go live. While much of the web relies on a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack, or LAMP, to power applications and dynamic websites, not everyone codes in a Linux environment. Those who prefer Windows can still replicate how their code will work by using WAMP to replicate a live web environment...