[The newsletter is a] curated weekly injection of hot PHP links for your inbox, including the latest articles of interest, videos from talks and tutorials, new projects and of course the latest news in PHP language and platform development. I promise to try to keep links fresh, comments relevant and the hate out of sight.

The first edition of the news letter will be coming out in about a week (on December 6th), so if you'd like to sign up, head over to the main site for the project and enter your address.

More recently, websites have taken a more aggressive approach in terms of inviting visitors to subscribe to a newsletter or consider some other special offer. The approach involves displaying a popup window the very first time a visitor navigates to the website. The visitor has the option of either responding to the offer or providing his e-mail address by interacting with the popup, or can choose to close the popup at which point it won't reappear for a (hopefully) significant period of time.

He uses two jQuery plugins - simplemodal and jquery-cookie to do some of the heavy lifting on the frontend. Full HTML, CSS and Javascript code are provided to make the interface work. There's no backend code for the PHP/MySQL integration, but it's a pretty simple form so it shouldn't be overly difficult.

Continuing on from Day 3, we'll expand our little application into a simple newsletter signup form. This will allow us to taker a closer look at both the email and the form_validation classes. Learn it all in this 30 minute screencast.

The tutorial is all in the screencast, but you can download the code to keep up on your own as well. There's also links to parts one, two and three to get you caught up.

There is a much better approach [than mass emails], and that is the use of a Web site that houses the newsletter and also limits reader access to paying subscribers. The ideal tool for creating such a site, is a content management system (CMS), such as Drupal, which is what we will be using in this tutorial. Specifically, we will explore how to use a forum for organizing the newsletter contents and allowing subscriber feedback, and also how to use a Drupal module for controlling subscriber access.

There's not really much in the way of actually installation help (that's what Drupal's documentation is for anyway), but he does talk about how it's initially set up, the subscription method and how to add an access-protected forum to the site to hold the newsletter information.

Understanding PHP theoretically, is only the beginning of actually truly knowing it. Once you sit down and start writing code, things will seem to magically clear up as you go along.

He gives examples of web application types and talks a bit about databases, a "key part of most web applications".

They have kindly allowed me to republish the most recent issue here for your enjoyment. If you want to read it on a regular basis though you are going to have to subscribe. So take a moment and head over to MyZend, login (or register) and on the preferences panel you'll find the checkbox to subscribe. Go ahead, we'll wait.

This edition is just a preview of all of the news that Zend provides each month on its activities, events, product updates, updates to the DevZone, and offers promotions you might want to be aware of.

As Cal mentions, though, you'll need to sign up to get future releases of the newsletter - they won't be posted over on the Zend Developer Zone.

He breaks it down into the individual steps you'll need to follow:

• Use a Framwork
• Queue in the database
• Use SMTP
• Check Headers
• Test it

This week's newsletter brings news about an updated distribution package for eZ publish 3.8.4, new documentation for eZ publish upgrades and new information about eZ platform development. The newsletter also includes the weekly forum watch and an update about the current bug fix status.

They cover the update to eZ publish, the "Upgrade" section in the documentation, new advancements concerning eZ platform, and some interesting discussions going on over in their forums.

Included in this issue are vulnerabilities for:

• SecurityImages Component Multiple Remote File Include Vulnerabilities
• Ajax Chat Multiple Remote Vulnerabilities
• ATutor Multiple SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
• Coppermine Photo Gallery Theme.PHP Remote File Include Vulnerability
• PHPAuction PHPAds_Path Variable Remote File Include Vulnerability
• myEvent Myevent.PHP Remote File Include Vulnerability

This is just a sampling of the issues reported, so head over to the full listing for the complete information.

Software mentioned in this edition includes:

• PHPWebGallery
• JetPhoto
• PHPList
• ShopWeezle
• XBrite
• PHPKIT

There are several more mentioned besides those above, so be sure to check out the full report to see if any scripts you use are effected.]]> Mon, 17 Apr 2006 07:05:21 -0500