\n Let’s take a little break from the MVC concept and look at a simple but effective PHP mailer. Like the PHP framework, I wrote this mailer from scratch just to show how easy it is to code pure PHP applications.

Lets first look at a bit of PHP “magic.”

if (isset($*POST['Submit'])){
    send*mail($*POST['subject'], $*POST['message'], $*POST['header']);
}
 else {
    show*form();
}

Okay, time to break it down.

if (isset($_POST['Submit']))

This checks the post to see if a submit button was pressed. If so, it will carry out the code:

send_mail("me@mysite.com", $_POST['subject'], $_POST['message'], $_POST['header']);

If there was no submit, because the page has just been loaded or an error occured, the following code is ran:

show_form();

The remainder of the program is contained in two functions, both of which we have already referred to. The first function is simple enough. It contains a single echo statement that creates the html code for a form.

The second function, sends the mail.

function send_mail($subject, $message, $header){
    $to = "myemail@mysite.com";
    mail($to, $subject, $message, $header);
    echo("Thank you for sending me an email....I'll get back to you as soon as I can");
}

We could convert the POSTS to variables before we use them.

$subject = $_POST['subject'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$header = $_POST['header'];

This allows us to make some modifications to the header.

from = "From:".$header;

This is of course is a very simple implementation of the PHP mail function. You can find a great deal more information on the PHP website. Stay tuned for our next installment.