Paul Reinheimer has posted about his experiences with sending mail, specifically as it relates to using the Zend_Mail component from the Zend Framework to handle the details.

Like every product, Natural Load Testing needs to send some mail, having written and re-written a bunch of different blocks of mail code over the years, I wanted to come up with something that would work now, and continue to serve us well into the future.

He chose Zend_Mail to fulfill some of his requirements (multipart emails, sending custom emails, templates for automatic emails) and includes some sample code showing it at work. The result is an object that can be created and, by calling a "basic" method, can send an email based on an HTML template (using the HTML Email Boilerplate for the base styling).

Klaus Silveira has submitted a project he's been working on to make browsing through git repositories a bit simpler with a local tool - gitlist.

GitList is an elegant and modern web interface for interacting with multiple git repositories. It allows you to browse repositories using your favorite browser, viewing files under different revisions, commit history, diffs. It also generates RSS feeds for each repository, allowing you to stay up-to-date with the latest changes anytime, anywhere. GitList was written in PHP, on top of the Silex microframework and powered by the Twig template engine. This means that GitList is easy to install and easy to customize. Also, the GitList gorgeous interface was made possible due to Bootstrap.

Since it's just a PHP-based application, installing it is as easy as cloning the source to a web-accessible directory and setting up a "config.ini" file with your settings. You can find out more about this project based on the popular Silex microframework on its GitHub page.

Danne Lundqvist has a new post where he shares a bit of code he's written to "come to grips" with an existing XML structure.

Very often I find myself writing input filters for large XML files using PHP. Common enough task; and PHP offer a great variety of tools to do this effectively depending on the situation. Unfortunately, almost as common is the lack of documentation for the aforementioned XML files. [...] I have looked around for a simple tool but I didn't really find a tool that gave me the quick and dirty overview I wanted. A year or so ago I finally wrote a small PHP class to analyze large XML files.

He includes an example XML file, the HTML output of the parsing and a sample of how to use the class to parse and output the XML structure, complete with some CSS.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing how to do some form validation using some basic PHP (no external libraries or tools here). This is a beginner level tutorial to help you get familiar with the concepts behind doing validation (and

In this article you'll construct and validate a simple form using HTML and PHP. The form is created using HTML and validation and processing of the form's contents is done with PHP. The goal is to teach you some basic HTML form elements and how their data is accessible to you in your PHP scripts.

They start with the form itself, a basic setup with various kinds of fields - text, select, radio and a checkbox. Both the HTML markup and the PHP to do the validation is included. They check for things like "not empty", "must select one" and optional fields. Be sure to read the comments for some good tips on filtering the form's input too.

New on DevShed today there's a tutorial looking at using one of the newer features of PHP, closures, as view helpers in a basic templating system.

In this two-part tutorial I'll be showing you, in a step-by-step fashion, how to use the goodies offered by closures in the implementation of an object-based, easily extendable template system. This system will allow you to embed anonymous functions easily into template files, and call them as typical view helpers, too.

He starts the process of creating the templating system by defining two interfaces, the View and DataHandler. Using these as a base, he creates an instance of the ViewInterface (a "View" class) that can set the template file to use, set values to be displayed and render the formatted output. Included is a basic template and how to use the View class to set values into it. The "render" method is called on the view and the HTML markup is produced. The closure comes in when they try to call a value "clientIp" that needs to do something more complicated than just having a string assigned to it.

In this new tutorial Smashing Magazine shows you how to create a mini "Christmas List" application with PHP, HTML and CSS (and a little bit of database help) to display a list of what you or your family wants this holiday.

'Tis the season to be jolly, and how much jollier could we make it than with a helpful Christmas wish list crafted for your family to ensure that you get maximum presentage this holiday? In this article, we will focus on creating a very simple system that allows you to add gift ideas to a Web page, and for your family (or whoever) to view the list.

They walk you through the setup of the basic PHP file structure, the HTML template for the list output, CSS to make it look nice and the actual PHP backend - working with a MySQL database to pull out product information and use a simple login method.

In a new post from Derick Rethans he talks about an extension version of Twig, the popular templating engine from the creators of the Symfony framework.

A while ago, Fabien asked me to have a look at porting one of Twig's slowest methods, TwigTemplate::getAttribute(), into a PHP extension. It is a complex method that does a lot of different checks and look-ups. Fabien's benchmarks showed that this method was responsible for quite a large amount of time. On top of that, it didn't seem that it could be optimised any further as PHP code itself.

He points to the twig-ext extension that's a reworked version of the "getAttribute" method from the tool and the performance gain (about 15%) it gives. Compiled templates will automatically call this new method in the extension. This update has already been merged into the main Twig repo.

On PHPMaster.com today they share a list of helpful tools and tricks that you can apply not only to your PHP development, but programming in general. They highlight code templates, using hotkeys and Ditto.

There are also other helpful pieces of software such as libraries, code snippets, and third party applications. In this article I'll show you how I use a feature built into NetBeans along with two other applications to increase my productivity when programming on Windows. These tips and techniques offer a different way of thinking about things which should be helpful to any developer, regardless of his skill level.

They start with a look at the Code Templates available in NetBeans (other IDEs/editors have a similar feature) to provide an easier starting place for your code, a tool called AutoHotKey that lets you define custom hotkey shortcuts and Ditto, a clipboard manager that lets you manage your copy/pasting better than the single-shot functionality Windows normally has.

In a new post to DZone.com Mitchell Pronschinske looks at closure object binding in PHP 5.4 applications (yes, we know PHP 5.4 isn't released yet). He explains what this is an shows some sample use cases for you to consider in your development.

For the people who read PHP's NEWS file, it's no surprise - but for all who don't here's is probably one of the biggest features of PHP 5.4: Closure Object Support is back. For me it's something I missed the most, when Closures were introduced in PHP 5.3. So I'm very happy, that's finally here (or back). I'm going to tell you about the rocky road which closure object binding support had and show you some simple use cases for it.

The functionality, based on this RFC, lets you more correctly bind closures to objects instead of having to pass the objects into the closure at create time. He includes an example from a Silex framework application and an example that refactors a helper method as a part of rendering a simple template.

In a new tutorial from PHPMaster.com Jason Pasnikowski takes a look at sending emails with PHP - an introduction to what the language offers and how it can be used to send an HTML version.

In most cases your installation of PHP will be capable of sending emails. If you are using a shared host, or if you installed PHP using a package management system like apt-get, more than likely you're all set. You'll really only need to worry about extra configuration if you're compiling PHP from source or if you're running it on Windows. In either case, there are plenty of resources available online to help you out. Because that's all beyond the scope of this article, I'll assume you're set. If not, Google will be your friend.

He starts with a simple example using the mail function but quickly moves on to sending a multi-part email with an attached zip file and HTML content. He includes the all code you'll need and explains each part in detail so you'll know exactly what's going on.