The 7PHP.com site, in collaboration with the Nomand PHP user group is giving away two free tickets to attend this month's user group event (happening May 22nd).

NomadPHP is like a virtual PHP User Group mainly for people who do not have the chance to avail of a local PHP user group. But it is open to ANYONE around the world. NomadPHP is an initiative brought forward by the icon of The PHP Community, namely 'His Awesomeness' Mr Cal Evans. It will kick-start its first group talk session on the Wednesday 22nd May 2013 (i.e in some 16 days as from the date of this post). The speaker is the PRO PHP Guy / PRO Zend Framework Evangelist and author of the book Zend Framework in action, Rob Allen. Rob will be introducing and talking about Zend Framework 2 - it is a must for anyone willing to learn ZF 2.

The Nomad PHP user group is designed to be a "user group for those that don't have one". It's a virtual group meeting once a month that you can attend anywhere in the world. You do have to purchase tickets, however. This post shows you how you can enter to win one of the two free tickets, though - either via email or by writing a PHP article for 7PHP.com.

On Mike Dalisay's site there's a recent post showing how to use the Phpass tool to salt, hash and store passowrd data in your application.

I think the main reason why we have to hash passwords is to prevent passwords from being stolen or compromised. You see, even if someone steal your database, they will never read your actual or cleartext password. I know that some PHP frameworks or CMS already provide this functionality, but I believe that it is important for us to know how its implementation can be made.

His sample application stores the user data in a MySQL database and does the salting+hashing at the time of the request. It uses a hard-coded salt and a value of 8 for the hashing/stretching. Screenshots of each page in the example application are also included.

In this new post to her site Alison shows how to send emails through the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) from a CentOS instance (an AMI in this case).

If you find yourself using Amazon SES for sending outgoing emails in a PHP web app, getting everything set up is much simpler than it may seem. In my case, this was on an AWS Linux image, but it will work on any Fedora/CentOS AMI. You can, of course, set up sendmail and use a proper MTA to send email from your web app, but in this case, I had inherited the requirement to set up an environment for code that was already written to use SES for outgoing email and Google Apps for incoming emails, so the actual mechanics weren't up for debate.

She includes screenshots showing how to configure the SES system with your site's domains and DNS as well as the email addresses you're planning on using. She links over to the MSMTP software you'll need to install on your instance to make the connection and what you'll need to do to get it configured for PHP's use. A sample email script is also included to test the connection (and where to look to make sure everything worked correctly).

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new post about using a design pattern in your application, specifically the usefulness of the Adapter pattern. This pattern makes it simpler to work with existing tools by providing a layer that allows unified access to the libraries from one interface.

Software development is improved every day by new concepts, methodologies, and high quality libraries and frameworks. But even with all these improvements, we cannot prevent change in software development. You may think that your system is designed perfectly to cater to all of its requirements, but there will always be a change request that ruins your perfect design. We have to be prepared for all possible changes as developers. The Adapter pattern is a design pattern which is commonly used to manage changes in development. Throughout this article we'll be looking at the usage and benefits of the patterns using real world applications.

He uses an illustration of email access via a mobile device and using it as an "interface" (via a SMS message) to the web to send an email. He then looks at a more practical code-based example, a set of adapters that let you subscribe/unsubscribe from various email services. He shows a wrong way to implement it as well as a good way - using it to work with Twitter to send tweets via a similar interface.

Iwan Luijks has a recent post looking at how you can send email through PHP on Windows via the Apache James server.

eveloping in PHP on Windows? Yep me too! Unfortunatly in opposite to developing on Linux, sending e-mail from PHP on Windows requires some more setup than just a bit of sendmail configuration. In this post I explain how to setup an Apache James Server and use it for e-mailing from PHP, all from and to your localhost.

He walks you through the download and installation and includes the changes you'll need to make to get it up and running correctly. He helps you test it's working correctly and how to get PHP set up and pointing to it for mail delivery. Finally, he has a line of PHP (using mail) to test the install and send a sample message.

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).

Wes Mason has started up another project to provide you with a weekly dose of curated PHP content direct to your mailbox - the PHP Weekly Newsletter:

[The newsletter is a] curated weekly injection of hot PHP links for your inbox, including the latest articles of interest, videos from talks and tutorials, new projects and of course the latest news in PHP language and platform development. I promise to try to keep links fresh, comments relevant and the hate out of sight.

The first edition of the news letter will be coming out in about a week (on December 6th), so if you'd like to sign up, head over to the main site for the project and enter your address.

In this new tutorial on LearnComputer.com, they show you how to, using a simple call to PHP's mail function, you can send a text message to anyone.

Text messaging seems more convenient than making phone calls and creating your own PHP script to send these messages is a very easy thing to set up. Get on board with these other companies that have found how convenient text messages are for their customer and start integrating text messaging into your PHP applications. In this article, I will show you two ways to accomplish this and you will be surprised at how simple this is to do.

Once you've found the right email address for the provider, sending the message is pretty simple using mail. As an alternative, they recommend a service like TextMagic to send the messages. It's a bit more reliable and uses SMS instead of email to get your message out.

Sebastian Göttschkes has a new post showing a method he's come up with to test email sending in a Symfony2 application.

On my endless struggle to achieving 100% code coverage and catching every possible (and impossible) test case (I'm just kiddinh, please don't do this!) I was in need for some way to test the sending of emails. This blog post will show you how to test this within a symfony2 (I'm using symfony 2.1 RC2) application, using the default swiftmailer.

It's not unit testing, it's functional testing, and he provides a bit of background on the process first then sets up a dummy listener for testing and how to plug in the Symfony2 functionality (via a getContainer call to get the DIC).

In this quick tutorial Arvind Bhardwaj shows a method for testing your scripts that need to send emails, but on your localhost system.

While developing web applications on localhost you must have always missed the functionality to send mails. As localhost does not support email service, so it has always been a bottleneck for email testing on localhost. But I have found a simple way to test emails on localhost using PHP. I have overridden the default mail() function of PHP to create a text/html file based on the email format. If the email is in html format, an HTML file is created otherwise a text file is created. You can see in this file what exactly is the content sent in your mail. See how does it work.

He shows how to override the mail function with your own custom "mail" function, just in a difference namespace. He includes the sample code to send the email (the "mail" function), a basic HTML template you can use and and example of it in use.