You have an account with a shipping service and you’ve checked out their API, but it looks pretty complex. And If you hard code your site to use the API, you’ll be up for a lot of work if you change shippers. This article focuses on how build a plugin-based library for different shippers (such as FedEx, UPS, or USPS) so you can access arbitrary services with only negligible, if any, code changes to your application.

Most of us are familiar with seeing URLs like bit.ly or t.co on our Twitter or Facebook feeds. These are examples of shortened URLs, which are a short alias or pointer to a longer page link. In this article you’ll learn how to build a fully functional URL shortener for your website in PHP.