I, for one, had lately become a language purist complaining why PHP doesn't have a much more organized structure for some of the things. And in this article, Rusmus seems to have read my mind. He answers those questions beautifully and emphasizes that PHP was never meant to be the Goddes of beautiful code structure, it was just a mistress that solved the Web problem.

Here is an extract from article that would make the point clear:

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/php_experts/rasmus_php.html

The interesting thing to note is that he answered this very question of mine about the lack of formalized structure to some of the things in PHP quite a while ago (somewhere in 2004 to be precise). A genius isn't a genius for no reason and mashaAllah Rasmus is definitely one of them. Looking at the amount of stuff he has written, it seems to me that he is not much of a talker, which reminds me of the line I once read in the beautiful PHP Manual: Those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk!

This auto form mailer script is pretty simple to use. All the required files are in the 'files' folder in the download package. You DO NOT have to worry about what is happening inside of the 'fm.php' script. If you are a PHP pro, then you can always fiddle around with the scrip itself, but otherwise you don't really need to.

Okay, so what you have to do is, make the right changes in your HTML form. A demo HTML form is included in the package but the following documentation helps you if you are a totally dumb human being like me:

In your HTML form, make sure the 'action' attribute is pointing to the 'fm.php' script and the post method of form submission is being used:

<form method="post" action="fm.php">

Along with that, make sure your form has the following four hidden form fields:

<input type="hidden" name="email_subject" value="Feedback from your website">
<input type="hidden" name="email_sender" value="webmaster@yoursite.com">
<input type="hidden" name="email_recipient" value="you@yoursite.com">
<input type="hidden" name="email_thanks_url" value="thanks.html">

The first one (email_subject) is the subject of the email message that you'll get when the form is submitted.

The second hidden field (email_sender) will have the email address that tells you from where the email is sent, usually its your site's email address such as webmaster@yoursite.com.

The third one is the email address where you want to actually receive the email message when the form is submitted. This should ideally be your own email address of course.

The final hidden field should be the url of the page that should be displayed once the form has been successfully submitted and emailed.

Additional Settings:

All the basic setup was done above but the Auto Form Mailer also provides additional functionality such as setting up required form fields and email validation fields.

To make sure a certain form field is required, prefix it with 'r_' in the name attribute like so:

<input type="text" name="r_Sender_Name" />

To implement the email validation field, where you need to make sure the person entered a valid email address, prefix the field with 'email_' and you're all good to go!

<input type="text" name="email_Sender_Email_Address" />

Download: www.thesocialgeek.com/afm.zip

Live Demo: http://www.thesocialgeek.com/afm/ 
(try leaving some of the initial fields empty to see the validation results)

More Help:

I have oversimplified this script so it can be used generically. You can alter it slightly to have it working within template systems such as smarty and others. If you need more help with this script, feel free to email me at kamran.usman at gmail dot com and I'll be glad to help.

Enjoy,
Kamran

I went to Saddar on Saturday and on my way back, me and my friend Saadi decided to check out Urdu bazaar as we had to look for some books related to our respective courses.

We did not find the course books we were looking for, but I saw this book titled 'PHP 5 Advanced' by Larry Ullman at Bismillah Book Shop in Urdu Bazaar. I took up the book, scanned through its contents and I thought I should buy it, so I did

I have my plans to take the Zend certification exam sometime soon so I thought this might just be the right kind of book to have for the preparation. Plus, I think even without the certification, this book is worth buying.

Larry Ullman is one of my favorite authors. I have read another of his books before and I loved it! Luckily for me, this book (that I just purchased) is an ideal match to complement Larry's previous book that I read before. It takes you from where you were left in the previous book.

You can find the table of contents here to whet your appetite. I just bought the book so I am on chapter 1 right now, hopefully will finish this up soon and become a pro =P

Cheers,
Kami

Take cares,
Kami!