Building a Quick and Easy Tag Board

Introduction

Tag boards enable users to leave a short message on your site without having to go through the trouble of registering. They are the new age guestbook, and apart from giving the visitors to your site a voice, they are sure to make your friends envious too.

From a development point of view, they are actually rather simple to develop. In this article we will create a quick and easy tag board for any web site. We will be taking advantage of the php and MySQL technologies, and a basic knowledge of both is assumed.

Please note: Developing an administration area and securing it is out of the scope of this article. Therefore we will not be incorporating the ability to delete/edit tags on our tag board.

What is a Tag Board?

Tag boards, in most cases, usually consist of a content area (normally an iframe) and an input area where users can put their message, name and a URL. An example of this can be seen below:

Our tag board in this case will be using a MySQL database to store its information. I will be developing the MySQL table so it will be easy for any user with an intermediate knowledge of using php and MySQL can easily develop the appropriate administration functionality.