On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to use Swift Mailer, a popular (and well-established) mailing tool.

Sending emails programmatically is a common task that programmers must deal with often. Although you can use PHP's native functions, they can be too low-level, especially when you want to attach one or more files to your message. If you don't want to use the native functions, or if you want to send mail using an object-oriented approach, then this is the article for you. I'll introduce you to Swift Mailer, a powerful component-based library that let's you send emails easily. Started in 2005, Swift Mailer is a library that provides several classes that allow you to send emails from within your PHP scripts or web applications.

Included in the post are a basic example of sending a plain-text email, working with attachments and including a template into the body of the message (with spots to fill text in).

Rob Allen has posted some notes to his site helping you get PHP set up on OSX Lion (10.8) successfully.

With OS X 10.8, Apple continues to ship PHP 5.3 with Xdebug, PEAR, GD and PDO_MYSQL. This is how to set it up from a clean install of 10.8.

He's broken it up into a few sections including the MySQL setup, Apache configuration , updating the main php.ini and setting up PHPUnit ("and friends") for your testing. He also includes setup instructions for the mcrypt and the PECL OAuth extensions.

Since you can't always be online when you need to install new libraries you'll need for your PHP work, Lorna Mitchell has posted a quick guide to downloading and installing PEAR packages when you're offline.

As with most tools that work really well, I know very little about PEAR. I mean, I use it all the time, and I love it for getting all the extensions installed that I need for the work I do. [...] However I'm now in a situation where I might need to install PEAR packages with a connection that may or may not be working, and I'm not sure exactly which packages I might need, so I wanted to know whether I could use PEAR as my packaging tool even when I wasn't able to reach the usual channels. And guess what? I can!

The install is a pretty simple two-step process - just download the package(s) you'll need for your development and point the PEAR installer (you'll need this installed first, obviously) at the archive file. It's smart enough to take care of the rest.

Stuart Herbert has a new post today showing how to get the well-established PEAR package management system working on Windows 7 so you can easily call "pear install" on whatever your needs might be.

So that I don't forget how to do this next time around. Worked for me, your mileage may vary. First step is to get a working install of PHP. [...] At this point, you should be able to open up a Command Prompt, and type 'php -v', and see the response 'PHP v5.4.latest …' appear as expected. Now for PEAR itself.

He gives step-by-step instructions on how to get PEAR up and running - downloading and configuring it with the correct Windows-based paths and using the PEAR_ENV.reg file to update your registry.

In this new post to his blog Phil Sturgeon talks about what he (and apparently several others) think is the "way forward for PHP" to make it a better language and ecosystem - packages.

What is a package? A package is a piece of reusable code that can be dropped into any application and be used without any tinkering to add functionality to that code. [...] Most package systems also allow for something called dependencies. [...] This is how most modern programming languages work, but to make a generalisation: PHP developers hate packages. Why? Well while other languages have great systems like CPAN for Perl, Gems for Ruby, PIP, PHP has had a terrible history with package management going back years.

He talks about one of the main current packaging systems, PEAR, and how, despite its attempts, it just hasn't seen the adoption the package management of other languages has. Phil makes a recommendation that is slowly becoming more and more popular in the PHP community - building "unframeworks". These sets of reusable components (similar to the ideas behind Aura, Symfony and Zend Framework 2) are designed to be dropped in and used without the dependencies of the frameworks they live in. He points to the Composer/Packagist dynamic duo as a way through all of the current packaging issues - a simple way to make any project an installable package just by adding a configuration file.

In a new post to his site Till Klampaeckel shows how to use PEAR and composer resources (two popular PHP package management tools) from inside of a chef deployment script.

This is something experimental I have been working on for our chef deployments. So the objective was/is to find a sane way to install PEAR packages and install dependencies with composer.

He shows how to set up the configuration script to discover a new PEAR channel, make the chef script not "fail hard" if a command returns a failed response code (as PEAR will do if the channel is already discovered). The "ignore_failure" configuration directive comes in handy for this. He also shows how to implement a LWRP in chef for both a PEAR and Composer resource.

You can find the code for this and other cookbook examples on his github account.

Building on the graphing tutorial in his last post Sameer continues on looking at graphs in PHP with this new post showing how to create an "agency matrix" of a currently built graph.

Building a graph is not enough; we also need the ability to search through it. To make it easier to build search algorithms, it is useful if we can represent the graph and its connections in a different way; adjacency matrix being one such representation. An adjacency matrix is a means of representing which vertices (or nodes) of a graph are adjacent to which other vertices.

He includes some sample code to extract the data from a graph (built with the PEAR Structures_Graph package) and create a basic "table" of information about each nodes' connections.

In the latest post to his blog Sameer Borate takes a look at using the Structures_Graph package from PEAR to create data structures in PHP with linked nodes for directed and undirected graphs.

The Pear Structures_Graph package allows creating and manipulating graph data structures. It allows building of either directed or undirected graphs, with data and metadata stored in nodes. The library provides functions for graph traversing as well as for characteristic extraction from the graph topology.

After sharing the one-line install, he shows how to create some instances of the package's Nodes and how to connect them to a graph and link them to other nodes. He includes a few examples - a simpler one with multiple nodes joined in a directed graph, another showing how to associate data with a node and how to query the graph for node connections and testing to see if the graph is acyclic.

Mike Wallner has shared a quick and easy HTTP caching technique in a new post to his blog today. The key is in using the PEAR HTTP_Header package.

Ever watched youself browsing e.g. a web forum? Noticed that you viewed the same page several times? Well, this means extraordinary and useless load for your server if there's no caching mechanism implemented in the web application. Even if there is some file or db cache you can still improve performance with implementing some http cache.

With a few simple lines of code using HTTP_Header, you can tell your scripts how long to set the "expires" header to on your requests. This increment (in seconds) is relayed to the browser to tell it when to next fetch the page and not reload from cache.

Mike Purcell has a new post to his blog showing a method he's followed to be able to use the popular PHPUnit unit testing software without having to go through the PEAR installer to get there.

PHPUnit is a great tool to protect us developers from introducing new defects when adding new features or re-factoring code. However there is one HUGE downside to PHPUnit; it must be installed using PEAR. Personally, I don't like 'auto-installers', I'd prefer to know what exactly is happening behind the scenes with regards to which libraries are required and how they are being called. [...] After breaking down the PHPUnit source code, I realized it could be installed without going through PEAR, and without too much headache.

He walks you through the directories you'll need to set up (test/vendor), the commands you'll need to get the latest version and unpack it, changes to set up some symlinks and updating the PHPUnit source to modify the autoloader, bootstrap and phpunit executable.