In a new tutorial on the Laravel News site, the author (Eric Barnes) shows you how to create a Laravel command that will send a daily email newsletter with the help of the Campaign Monitor service.

Here on Laravel News, we offer multiple ways of staying up to date with new content. Everything from auto-sharing to all the social media channels, a read-only Telegram channel, a weekly newsletter and last March we started offering a daily email digest.

To send the daily email we utilize the Laravel scheduler and Campaign Monitor so it’s completely automated. In this tutorial let’s look at how its all setup and how you can easily add this to your site to start sending out automated emails.

The tutorial starts by helping you get the Campaign Monitor SDK package installed (via Composer) and configured to use their API with your own key. Next it walks you through the creation of the console command to hook into the Scheduler for automated sending. It includes the code you'll need to find the data (in this case the latest blog posts) and the email method to send the information to the Campaign Monitor API. There's a brief mention of the creation of the HTML for the newsletter based on the Zurb Foundation and the configuration change to add the command to the scheduler for execution.

On his site has posted parts one and two of a series showing how to build a chatbot that can help provide more direct interaction with your users via a "newsletter" feature.

Since the beginning of the year, I am working on a new project of mine. It's a book called Build Chatbots with PHP. Follow the link to find out what it is about and who it is for.

More interesting to us is the newsletter, to which you can subscribe on the book's website. About once or twice a month I will send out an email with news on the development of the book.

He starts part one by outlining the general plan and functionality for the bot and its integration with Facebook. The tutorial then walks through the installation and configuration of the BotMan Studio project. It also shows the setup of the application on the Facebook service and how to connect it to the BotMan application. He walks through the setup of a few commands to welcome the user and start the conversation. Part two continues the process showing how to store the user and subscription information and how to send the newsletter notifications. He also makes some suggestions of extra functionality you might want to add like a typing indicator, a "fallback" for unknown commands.

On the JetBrains blog Gary Hockin has just posted the latest "PHP Annotated Monthly" edition for September 2015. These posts cover recent happenings in the PHP community, linking to more information and the people involved.

As the autumn conference season begins to ramp up, it’s time for the September edition of PHP Annotated Monthly – bringing you all the news, tips, tricks and tutorials from the PHP community.

He touches on three main topics - the PHP language itself, news about various frameworks and tools talked about over the month and happenings in the community itself. Some of the topics mentioned include:

• the RC1 release of PHP7
• articles about hard-coding status codes and saving memory with generators
• New releases for Zend Framework, Symfony, WordPress and Drupal
• the new Expressive framework from the Zend Framework team
• the PHP Mentoring application

...and lots more. Check out the full post for more topics and links to plenty of others. You can also check out some of the back issues on the Annotated Monthly archive page.

The JetBrains blog has just posted their latest edition of the "PHP Annotated Monthly" series with their review for July 2015.

Our July issue of PHP Annotated Monthly is here, bringing you updates on PHP, frameworks, tools, tips for coding, community, and more. Read this month’s digest curated by Mikhail Vink, PhpStorm Product Marketing Manager.

In this month's article there's mentions of things like:

• New PHP versions released
• Work on PHP7
• Updates to various frameworks and tools
• Being able to order an elePHPant on demand (and the funding of the woolly mammoth
• PHP cheatsheets
• Information about contributing back to PHP

Check out the full post for even more topics and links to other great resources.

The Laravel News site has posted their latest interview with a member of the Laravel community (their Artisan Files series). This time they talk with Eric Barnes, the person behind the Laravel Newsletter.

This is a special edition of the Artisan Files series. Over the past few weeks I’ve had several people ask me to be interviewed and it wasn’t something I even considered. For this interview Taylor Otwell volunteered to ask the questions and if you have a question that wasn’t asked just leave a comment.

In the interview you'll learn some about Eric including:

• How he got started in development (and involved with Laravel)
• What inspired him to start the Laravel Newsletter
• What applications he considers his "must haves"
• Three things he thinks make for better programmers
• His favorite conference talk

...and much more. Check out the full interview for the answers to these and other questions. Also, be sure to sign up for the newsletter to keep up to date on the Laravel community.

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.

On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore has a new tutorial posted showing how to combine PHP, MySQL and a jQuery interface to create a newsletter subscription popup for your site that doesn't interfere with the flow of the site.

More recently, websites have taken a more aggressive approach in terms of inviting visitors to subscribe to a newsletter or consider some other special offer. The approach involves displaying a popup window the very first time a visitor navigates to the website. The visitor has the option of either responding to the offer or providing his e-mail address by interacting with the popup, or can choose to close the popup at which point it won't reappear for a (hopefully) significant period of time.

He uses two jQuery plugins - simplemodal and jquery-cookie to do some of the heavy lifting on the frontend. Full HTML, CSS and Javascript code are provided to make the interface work. There's no backend code for the PHP/MySQL integration, but it's a pretty simple form so it shouldn't be overly difficult.

NETTUTS.com has posted the next part in their "CodeIgniter From Scratch" series today adding on more functionality to include the ability to signup for a newsletter about updates to the site.

Continuing on from Day 3, we'll expand our little application into a simple newsletter signup form. This will allow us to taker a closer look at both the email and the form_validation classes. Learn it all in this 30 minute screencast.

The tutorial is all in the screencast, but you can download the code to keep up on your own as well. There's also links to parts one, two and three to get you caught up.

On the Developer Tutorials site today, there's a new article post from Michael Ross walking you through the installation and creation of an online newsletter with the Drupal content management system.

There is a much better approach [than mass emails], and that is the use of a Web site that houses the newsletter and also limits reader access to paying subscribers. The ideal tool for creating such a site, is a content management system (CMS), such as Drupal, which is what we will be using in this tutorial. Specifically, we will explore how to use a forum for organizing the newsletter contents and allowing subscriber feedback, and also how to use a Drupal module for controlling subscriber access.

There's not really much in the way of actually installation help (that's what Drupal's documentation is for anyway), but he does talk about how it's initially set up, the subscription method and how to add an access-protected forum to the site to hold the newsletter information.

In a new post to the his blog today, Stefan Mischook takes a look at what some of the most common components of a PHP web application include.

Understanding PHP theoretically, is only the beginning of actually truly knowing it. Once you sit down and start writing code, things will seem to magically clear up as you go along.

He gives examples of web application types and talks a bit about databases, a "key part of most web applications".