Archive for January, 2010

How to Send an Email using PHPmailer and Gmail for SMTP

14 Jan, 2010  No Comment

I needed to offer a client the ability to send Email using PHPmailer and Gmail. The below is what I came up with, which worked flawlessly:

require("PHPMailer_v5.1/class.phpmailer.php");
 
$mail             = new PHPMailer();
 
$body             = "Message Body";
 
$mail->Mailer = "smtp"; 
$mail->Host = "ssl://smtp.gmail.com"; 
$mail->Port = 465; 
$mail->SMTPAuth = true; // turn on SMTP authentication 
$mail->Username = "username@gmail.com"; // SMTP username 
$mail->Password = "password"; // SMTP password 
$mail->IsSMTP(); // telling the class to use SMTP
$mail->SetFrom('from@address.com', 'First Last');
 
$mail->Subject    = "PHPMailer Test Subject via smtp, basic with authentication";
 
$mail->AltBody    = "To view the message, please use an HTML compatible email viewer!"; // optional, comment out and test
 
$mail->MsgHTML($body);
 
$mail->AddAddress('email@address.com', 'First Last');
 
if(!$mail->Send()) {
  echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
} else {
  echo "Message sent!";
}

The part that threw me for a loop was right here:

$mail->Host = "ssl://smtp.gmail.com";

I was using simply smtp.gmail.com. I knew from setting up mail clients that you needed to use SSL, but it didn’t occur to me to tell PHPmailer to do the same. When it came to me, simply looking up how to instruct PHPmailer to use SSL did the trick.

Wordpress in_tree() function

11 Jan, 2010  No Comment

Just created a wordpress funciton in_tree($a, $b) which checks to see if page ID $a is in the tree of page ID $b. That is, it checks to see if $a is a child of $b or $a is $b.

/**
 * Checks to see if a $in_tree_id is in the tree of
 * $in_tree_root post (is a child of or is the post
 * ID provided)
 */
function in_tree($in_tree_id, $in_tree_root)
{
	if($in_tree_id == $in_tree_root)
		return true;
	if(!get_post($in_tree_id)->post_parent)
		return false;
	return in_tree(get_post($in_tree_id)->post_parent, $in_tree_root);
}