Freek Van der Herten has posted a new tutorial to his site showing you a method for sending a "welcome" email for your Laravel (5.3) application using the recently added "mailables" functionality.

Recently I was working an a project where, in order to use the webapp, users should first apply for an account. Potential users can fill in request form. After the request is approved by an admin they may use the app.

Our client expected that the barrier to request an account should be very low. That’s why the request form doesn’t contain a password field. Instead, when an account is approved, a welcome mail is sent with a link to where the user can specify a password.

In this post I’d like to show you how we solved this with Laravel 5.3’s mailables.

He starts with a high level overview of what he's trying to accomplish: sending the approval when the admin approves a new user in the system. He includes all the code you'll need to create:

• the "approve" method in the User model
• the event handler for the "UserApproved" event
• generating the password reset hash/token
• the actual code for the mailable class to send the message

He also includes the view for the email's contents, a simple "WelcomeController" to handle the user responding to the message and the view for the verification and password reset "welcome" page.

As Paul Jones mentions in his latest post to his site, the much talked-about PSR standards that were proposed by the PHP-FIG group, PSR-1 and PSR-2, have been accepted.

Earlier today, the PHP Framework Interoperability Group accepted two standards recommendations. [...] There's been a lot of commentary about these proposals over the past two weeks, some of it positive and some of it negative.

He includes links to some of the commentary that's been made about the standards recently, and spends some time responding to some of the negative comments specifically, like:

• What the hell is the "PHP Standards" group? I've never heard of it before now.
• Why are you guys so secretive and closed?
• So once I join the list, I can vote on PHP-FIG Standards Recommendations? Sweet!
• Whatever. I don't need you guys telling me what to do. If I don't want to follow your so-called "standards" then you can't make me.

PHPMaster.com has posted the second part of their series helping you build a mobile photo blog powered by email attachments pulled over POP3. (Part one is here)

This is the second article in a two part series in which I show you how to create a photo blog that is updated from your mobile device. Part 1 laid out the plan for building the application, set up the database requirements, and introduced you to some user contributed functions from the PHP manual which make it easy to retrieve messages from a POP3 mail server. In this installment I show you how to bring everything together so you can start photo-blogging on the go.

In this new tutorial they include the code to authenticate against the database, insert the email details into the tables and inserting the formatted results into blog posts. It's finished off with the code to pull out the latest entries and display them along with their matching photos.

PHPMaster.com has started up a new series of tutorials today with part one of "Creating a Mobile Photo Blog". The set of tutorials will show you how to create a simple blogging tool that will upload images as submitted via an email address.

This is the first article in a two-part series in which I will show you how to create a photo blog as part of your personal website which you can update from your phone simply by sending an email. You’ll write a script to check the inbox of an email account for new messages using POP3; the script will extract the messages’ subject line, body text, and attachments and update a database accordingly. You can then pull the information from the database for display on your blog, in a sidebar, or however else you see fit.

The start with some of the security considerations you'll need to keep in mind when creating a script like this depending on how open you want it to be (like filtering based on the "From" email or sending an approval message before posting). Included in the post is the SQL to create their basic tables for posts, image details and the pending items. There's also a PHP class (POP3) that makes an IMAP connection to a remote server, authenticates as your account and fetches the latest messages along with their attachments. These are pulled with a quick script and displayed via a foreach.

Part two will get into more of the integration of the images and the approval technique prior to posting the images.