Useful PHP classes and other great tools

From time to time there is a task that needs to be accomplished and it’s a quite difficult one. When that happens and the deadline is tight it’s a very good solution to search the web for what you need. Below, I’ll put some good stuff I found on the web.

First of all, there is a need for a WYSIWYG editor. For this, I recommend FCKeditor or TinyMCE. A very good image upload plugin for TinyMCE is Ibrowser.

Another thing that is a real pain is email sending. Let’s take the scenario of having to send emails to a list of users. Those emails must have a file attached and must be delivered in HTML format with alternative text format. The easy way to do this is by using the PHPMailer class. It can send emails with multiple TOs, CCs, BCCs and REPLY-TOs , HTML email, Embedded image support and Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email and that’s not all. See it for yourself.

If you need to create PDF files, one solution could be FPDF. FPDF is a PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with pure PHP. And it’s completely free. Just remember to carefully read the manual and take a look over the tutorials.

For advanced AJAX and JavaScript effects I recommend the mootools framework. It’s very easy to use ( I’m the proof of that ) and you have access to demo’s and online documentation and tutorials. You could also consider prototype along with script.aculo.us for effects and other tricks.

If you need a graph, a good solution is JpGraph. JpGraph “is a Object-Oriented Graph creating library for PHP >= 4.3.1 The library is completely written in PHP and ready to be used in any PHP scripts“. Or, if you would prefer Flash graphs, a good solution is amCharts. The only problem with amCharts is that you must pay a license in order to get rid of the credits link that appears in your flash charts.

Oh, and last but not least, the Smarty template engine. I must say that it saves me a lot of time just using it and I strongly recommend it even though I know that PHP by itself is a very good template system.

Well, that’s about it for now. If you know other great classes or frameworks, please share them.