As you may (or may not, if you're a feed reader) have noticed, a few things have just changed around here. PHPDeveloper.org has made the move away from the Zend Framework over to the Solar Framework, and to answer the question of why - really it was just to try something new. We'd been using the Zend Framework since around back when it first hit the scene and felt like it was time for a change.

Paul Jones, Rodrigo Moraes, Antti Holvikari and the crew have done a fine job in producing a framework that's not only easy to use but makes building powerful web applications nice and easy. You can check out more about the framework on its site, SolarPHP.com.

That said, I'm sure there'll be a few growing pains as this new version of the site gets settled in, so bear with us. If you happen to spot something that might be an issue or just an opinion you want to share, drop us a line at info@phpdeveloper.org to let us know.

Paul Jones has posted a new tutorial about using the mail functionality of the Solar framework - the Solar_Mail and Solar_Stmp packages.

While each of these [PEAR Mail, PhpMailer, SwiftMailer, Zend_Mail] will work with Solar, the new Solar_Mail and Solar_Smtp packages work "natively", in that they support automatic configuration, locale and exception inheritance, and so on. Read on for some examples on how to use them.

In his example he sets up and sends a simple message, setting the contents of the email (sent as an HTML message). Since there's been much talk about the safety of a lot of the mailing systems in frameworks, Paul talks about how it's been secured from header injections, through safe attachments, and from a transport dependency-injection for SMTP.

There's even a method included that lets you take the SMTP information out of the script and put it into the Solar configuration file to use in the entire application.