May 25th, 2004

New York PHP kicks an exciting summer schedule off with two presentations this May.

After the meeting, you're invited to join us for food, drinks and wireless at Abbey Tavern.

fPage
Felix Zaslavskiy guides us through fPage, a small utility class that remembers users click history on the server side. Developers can bookmark any page and be able to redirect the user back to that page at any time in the future. fPage uses PHP sessions to keep track of state and provides a nice user interface to the developer.

HTML_QuickForm
Displaying and processing HTML forms correctly in PHP can be a headache. You need to pay attention to printing context-sensitive error messages, preserving default values, properly encoding user input, and validating many different kinds of fields. The PEAR package HTML_QuickForm removes that headache. It's flexible architecture makes it a breeze to programmatically construct, display, and validate HTML forms of any size.

In this talk, David Sklar shows you how to harness the power of HTML_QuickForm in your PHP programs. He explains:

• Working with different element types
• Validating input with built-in and custom rules
• Processing submitted form data, including file uploads
• Customizing form display with the default renderer

With HTML_QuickForm, a form is a logical collection of typed form elements instead of an undifferentiated blob of HTML. This makes it simple to decide dynamically what elements go in a particular form, to assign appropriate error messages and validation rules to individual elements, and to control the form layout in a systematic way across an entire site.

Instead of relying on ad-hoc functions and methods for tasks like checking whether required form fields are filled in, preserving a default value in a dropdown menu, or adjusting the style attributes of form elements, use HTML_QuickForm for a simple, structured approach to form management.

Join Felix and David for an in-depth look at fPage and HTML_QuickForm.

SAMS Publishing, our latest sponsor, has been kind enough to provide us with books to raffle off. Come prepared with a business card to enter the drawing.