phpmail() IS OUT! Get rid off it. Now!

One of the most common sources of spam are “hacked” webservers and poorly or even non-secured forms. By using phpmail the webserver must be allowed to send mails without checks for a valid sender. This results – mostly on a shared web host – in having checking every clients installations for the bad script while the mailserver gets blacklisted due to the spam wave.

There are enough possibilities out there on how to send mail without using phpmail such as PEAR Net_SMTP. I even encourage every webmaster to turn off phpmail by blacklisting this function in php.ini. This way the developers would be forced to name an smtp account for sending mail which is much easier to track (and shut off if neccessary).

The next steps will be a Zend Form derivate that can generate forms by using the meta information from your doctrine
model but stays fully customizable as well as cool Ajax/ExtJs support.

Download 0.001 PreAlpha

I guess many people had this problem before and I think everybody managed to solve this quite similar. Anyways, just in case this is useful for anybody: here’s how I added a pagination to a site recently.

Given you have an array of products for example. Or maybe search results, a list of articles… something like that. Unfortunately they are too many to display them on a single page. Well, sure, you could but let’s be honest: that isn’t an option as the page would exceed its “scrollable-with-no-harm-to-scroll-fingers” length. And you don’t want to get sued by your visitors, right
Ok, so you’re going to add a nice pagination to your site, so that everybody is happy.
What I found out to be a bit tricky was to calculate the actual number of pages. We need that number so that we know, how many page links we will show next to our current view.

Two simple examples to illustrate the probelm:
Let’s say we have 8 items. 8 divided by 4 is 2, so we’re going to need two pages. No big deal, right?
Okay then we try this with 9 items. 9 divided by 4 gives us 2.25. So we will clearly need a 3rd page for product number 9, but how do we calculate this from our result?

$itemcount = $res->length();
$pagemin = $itemcount / 4;
$pagemax = ceil($itemcount / 4);
if ( $pagemax - intval($pagemin) === 1) ) {
$pages = $pagemax;
} else {
$pages = intval($pagemin);
}


The code explained

That’s why I compare two values here: the actual division result and the next bigger integer. Now we try to find out if both values differ. If they do, we have a scenario where we do want another page, so we pick the bigger result as our page number. If not we are just happy and use the smaller number.

So now that we know our actual page count we can do something (slightly simplified) like this:


while($i = 0;$i < $pages; $i++) {
print '<a href="?page=' . $i . '">Page ' . $i . '';
}


A pagination helps to navigate through long lists of items

With a little bit of styling this even looks nice. And of course, this is just a start. You also might want to add “previous” and “next buttons”, or those “first page”, “last page” buttons, limit the maximum number of page links shown, or you could center the currently viewed page in the middle, hide the previous button on the first page, etc… There are a lot of fine tuning options that will improve the user experience of your pagination.

Sadly the documentation and the usage examples are very poor on this topic so PHPBuilder Forum member iceomnia decided to do something about it and wrote a quick howto on this subject.

With that information you can jump right into the code and generate your own XML files within minutes. Have fun…

Link: PHPBuilder.com, the best resource for PHP tutorials, templates, PHP manuals, content management systems, scripts, classes and more.

Maybe it’ll help you through the hard time figuring out the basics or solving specific issues.

Link: Zend Framework Book: Surviving The Deep End.