Our popular series of PHP tutorials and MySQL tutorials

Itching to create your own mashup? The huge range of Yahoo! APIs gives you total creative freedom and countless sites are taking full advantage. Here, Akash explains how to build your own Yahoo! mashup, using PHP to combine Yahoo! Maps and Search functionality to create a truly useful local search engine that really works!

Social networking sites like Facebook provide site owners and developers with myriad new ways to promote their offerings. Here, David walks you through the many ways in which your apps can interact with Facebook to provide enhanced functionality and facilitate the cross-promotion of your sites.

If you're deaf to the dulcet tones of symfony, the latest PHP framework, let Francois teach you a brand new tune. In this practical primer, he illuminates the nuances of symfony as he shows you how to create your own masterpiece: a fully functional image gallery.

Is the Flickr interface doing justice to your stunning snaps? It's time to consider customization! Jonathan shows us the ropes in his hands-on tutorial, as he uses CakePHP and the Flickr API to build an attractive, fully customized gallery that displays Flickr photos to their best advantage.

CakePHP is a mature framework for PHP developers who want the structure and time-saving benefits of Ruby on Rails, without having to leave their comfort zone. As Fabio explains, CakePHP's scaffolding lets us build a prototype application quickly, using minimal code. Cake also offers many helper classes to extend and customize your application while retaining a sensible and easily maintainable architecture.

What if your site could change the appearance of images on-the-fly, in response to user interaction? Well, it can. As Michael explains, by integrating ImageMagick with your site, you can allow users to resize maps, rotate aerial shots, zoom in on product shots, and more.

PHP's availability, ease of use, and support makes it the first choice for many budding developers. Yet the potential for the unwary coder to overlook certain key aspects of security lands countless developers in hot water. Pax explores the key security holes, common issues, and typical oversights in this hands-on primer.

Protect your online forms from automated attacks using a security image: users must correctly enter the characters shown in the image before the form can be submitted. Edward shows how to create security images dynamically using PHP, then implements the solution in an online form. And he provides all code in full!

BB code is a simple set of instructions that provide rules as to how a piece of text should be formatted. In this hands-on tutorial, Stoyan explains the basics that every developer should know about the use of BB code in PHP applications.

Build a random picture showcase... without it being completely random?! As David explains, it's not as hard as it sounds. His solution calls a PHP script from an HTML page to create an image gallery that, though random, avoids duplicate images.