Today we’re going to talk about sending amazing, templated, parsed HTML emails using PHP and the PHPMailer class. I know it sounds trivial- “Oh sure! Let’s send some messages!”, however, I do get a ton of requests for assistance when dealing with email templates and parsed content within those templates, so I figured this would be a good thing to write about! Background When I refer to email templates, I’m referring specifically to chunked, individual […]

Minifying CSS and Javascript just got way more awesome with MagicMin 3.0.0! Along with better directory path support for windows machines, V3 includes the ability to output merged/minified files with unique hashed filenames for better caching support

If you’ve been to this site before,  you’ll probably notice that I’ve switched from the syntax highlighter that I’d used to display code to something a ton cleaner (the credit does not go to me, the new syntax highlighting plugin came from this TutsPlus article). Until a few hours ago, I used SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, which looked great, and was super easy to use, however, there were some issues with using it on a website displaying code that people […]

Ever have one of those days where you get a new codebase on your desk, but realize that you’re missing ALL THE IMAGES?  (face slap). I’ve had plenty of those, and here’s how to stop slapping yourself and just use PHP to download files from a list in a text file! The Directory Structure Easy enough, but just to be safe, the following is the directory structure used for this: process.php attachment.txt files/ Process.php The […]

If you’re a PHP developer, and you prefix questionable function calls with the “@” symbol, you should be aware that I’m onto you!  If the first line of code you write after <?php is “error_reporting(0);”, then we shouldn’t be friends anymore.  Error reporting in PHP is really really really important, and you should probably also stop reading, because this article will just fill your soul with rage. Keep in mind, this article isn’t about whether or […]

The question that I get asked more than any other is, “What tools do you use to code?”, so I figured I’d spread some software/knowledgebomblove and lay out my workflows! I’ll also break it down by the actual order of my workflow (since that’s a bit easier for me to write/remember anyway): Textmate I code by hand, and since I code by hand, Dreamweaver isn’t even a thing that exists on my computer.  I use […]

Ever wonder, “Huh, I have a company page on facebook, but DAMN it’s lame to have to login to se the stats”?  I did, and as always- let’s grab some data with PHP! CODE! At the core of nearly anything you want to do with the facebook open graph is this url: https://graph.facebook.com/(username or id) And really, this doesn’t get a whole lot longer for the basics, we just need to use file_get_contents and json_decode […]

A long long time ago, I wrote about using PHP to merge and minify javascript and CSS.  And it sucked!  It forcefully recreated the files each and every time the page was loaded, failed to compress or minify javascript files properly (resulting in some super duper errors), and overall was lame. It was however, short, so at least it had that going for it, which my actually awesome new class “MagicMin” does not have (it […]

As I’m sure anyone who has visited this site more than a single time knows, I love php functions!  They make repeated processes and actions a breeze to initiate and take effect without having to copy-paste the same block of code into 25 different pages.  Then g-d forbid you should need to make a change to how it operates, or even worse- it’s just generally terrible and needs a full do-over! The day I discovered […]