Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5, 3rd Edition

Chapter 26. Bringing It All Together

Now that you’ve reached the end of your journey into learning the hows, whys, and wherefores of dynamic web programming, I want to leave you with a real example that you can sink your teeth into. In fact, it’s a collection of examples, because I’ve put together a simple social networking project comprising all the main features you’d expect from such a site.

Across the various files, there are examples of MySQL table creation and database access, CSS style sheets, file inclusion, session control, DOM access, Ajax calls, event and error handling, file uploading, image manipulation, the HTML5 canvas, and a whole lot more.

Each example file is complete and self-contained, yet works with all the others to build a fully working social networking site, even including a style sheet you can modify to completely change the look and feel of the project. Being small and light, the end product is particularly usable on mobile platforms such as a smartphone or tablet, but will run equally well on a full-size desktop computer.

I leave it up to you to take any pieces of code you think you can use and expand on them for your own purposes. Perhaps you may even wish to build on these files to create a social networking site of your own.

Designing a Social Networking Site

Before writing any code, I sat down and came up with several things that I decided were essential to such a site. These included:

• A signup process

• A login form

• A logout facility

• Session control

• User profiles ...