PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

Solution Overview
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content. However, it increases the user-friendliness of the system to let the administrator
create a newsletter in his favorite editor and then upload the file to the web server.This
also makes it easy for the administrator to add images to an HTML newsletter. For this,
you can use the file upload capability discussed in Chapter 19,“Interacting with the File
System and the Server.”
You need to use a slightly more complicated form than you used in previous projects.
For this project, you require the administrator to upload both text and HTML versions
of the newsletter, along with any inline images that go into the HTML.
After the newsletter has been uploaded, you need to create an interface so that the
administrator can preview the newsletter before sending it.This way, he can confirm that
all the files were uploaded correctly.
Note that you also store all these files in an archive directory so that users can read
back issues of newsletters.This directory needs to be writable by the user your web server
runs as.The upload script will try to write the newsletters into ./archive/, so you
need to make sure you create that directory and set permissions on it appropriately.
Sending Mail with Attachments
For this project, you want to be able to send users either a plain-text newsletter or a
“fancy” HTML version, according to their preference.
To send an HTML file with embedded images, you need to find a way to send
attachments. PHP’s simple mail() function doesn’t easily support sending attachments.
Instead, you can use the excellent Mail_Mime package from PEAR, originally created by
Richard Heyes. It can deal with HTML attachments and can also be used to attach any
images that are contained in the HTML file.
Installation instructions for this package are included under “Installing PEAR” in
Appendix A,“Installing PHP and MySQL.”
Solution Overview
For this project, you again use an event-driven approach to writing the code, as in
Chapter 29,“Building a Web-Based Email Service.”
To help you get started, we again began by drawing a set of system flow diagrams to
show the paths users might take through the system. In this case, we drew three diagrams
to represent the three different sets of interactions users can have with the system. Users
have different allowable actions when they are not logged in, when they are logged in as
regular users, and when they are logged in as administrators.These actions are shown in
Figures 30.1, 30.2, and 30.3, respectively.
In Figure 30.1, you can see the actions that can be taken by a user who is not logged
in. As you can see, he can log in (if he already has an account), create an account (if he
doesn’t already have one), or view the mailing lists available for signup (as a marketing
tactic).