10+ extremely useful PHP classes

PHP PSD Reader

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about this PHP which allow you to display any Adobe PSD file on screen. Very usefull to create preview of PSDs designed for clients, for example.
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Browser detect

One of the most common (and boring) problem for front-end developers is definitely cross-browser compatibility. This PHP class will detect almost all browsers and simplify your cross-browser work.
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Akismet

Remember those days without spam? If your website gets spammed in any ways, Akismet can probably help you. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.
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ADOdb

The large majority of websites and web apps are using databases to store all kinds of data. ADOdb is a database abstraction library for PHP, supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, Interbase, Firebird, Oracle, MS SQL and more. ADOdb is quite easy to learn and have lots of nice features as such as extensive portability support, speed and BSD licencing.
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HTML Purifier

As it name tells, HTML Purifier is a PHP class created to help you writing a better code. HTML Purifier can remove malicious code and make sure your code is standard-compliant. A great tool for all developers.
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Google charts API

Charts are very useful and highly asked by clients, but they can be a lot of work. I remember some years ago when a friend of mine had to create charts using Photoshop every week for one of his clients. Well, this time is gone for good.
With the Google charts API, a simple chart can be created and displayed on screen using as little as 4 lines of code.
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pChart

pChart is another chart class, and it is as good as Google charts API. Data can be easily retrieved from SQL queries, CSV files, or manually provided.
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PHP Excel

Excel documents are highly popular in the corporate world. Considering that fact, there’s a strong chance that one of your clients asks for you to create excel files in PHP someday.
Happilly, the PHP Excel engine allow you to easily create and manipulate lots of different files, as such as Excel 2007, Open XML, or PDF.
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Country from IP

Some websites are able to detect your location and automatically display information related with your language. How do they do that? Quite simple, they use your IP adress to find your location. The Country from IP class is easy to use and will allow you to get the country a specific IP is from.
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Cache Manager

If you’re working on a high traffic site, there’s not doubt you’ll need to cache files in order to improve performance. This will be very easy an simple to do, using this very handy class. A defifinitive must-have, in my opinion.
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WPGet

As I know many of you have a WordPress blog, I just can’t finish this article without a great tool for our favorite blogging engine.
WPGet is a PHP class which allow you to easily get infos from a WordPress 2.X database. In other words, it allows you to get posts, comments, etc from a WordPress blog, on a non-WordPress site. Great, isn’t it?
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