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

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 […]

Since I posted my mysqli database class originally on February 18th, I’ve gotten some great feedback, and A LOT of downloads, which is amazing! As a side note, I recommend always grabbing this class from the github repo at https://github.com/bennettstone/simple-mysqli I’ve also been using my own class on a large number of websites, and through the course of normal usage, and user feedback, I have made some changes… The error reporting has been enhanced to […]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not lazy, but I’m also NOT a front end designer or HTML guru. So when it comes to repeating tasks endlessly that are even mildly lengthy- I get bored. That’s right, I said it- b.o.r.e.d. Tonight was a perfect example! As a back end engineer, I’m nearly always provided very tidy, but elaborate HTML assets, which are then on my desk to become amazing and highly functional beings. But after […]