Years ago when I was working on a photo gallery for davedash.com I got the art of making tumbnails down fairly well. It was automated and didn't allow for specifying how the thumbnail should be made. With dozens of photos (which was a lot back then), when would I find that kind of time.

Flashback to today, for my company... we want users with avatars... but nothing too large. Maybe a nice 80x80 picture. Well the coolest UI I've seen was Apple's Address Book which let you use this slider mechanism to crop a fixed sized image from a larger image.

They create a pretty slick little app, using symfony to handle the framework for the app, some Javascript in the form of Prototype to make the controls, and plenty of CSS/HTML to make it usable. You can check out the demo here.

Though the term DHTML is becoming a bit more scarce than it once was (being replaced by phrases like "dynamic pages with Javascript" or "javascript DOM manipulation"), it's still a powerful ally when combined with a flexible backend like PHP. They provide a few examples of applications that can be built with this combination including popup ad boxes, general popups, spinners (show/hide blocks of HTML), and tabs.

For each of the items, they give both the HTML and PHP code to get the job done, making it a simple matter of grabbing the code and pasting it into your favorite editor to get started. The next part of the article series will cover the creation of dynamic graphs and the creation of new HTML elements with the help of Javascript.