Drupal 7 Module Development

Building an Admin Interface
PHP mail configuration
In order for Drupal to send an e-mail, your server must be configured so
that PHP's mail() function will work. Typically this involves installing
and configuring a local mail server. Most shared hosting providers are
already properly configured to do this, but if you are on a VPS or other
custom-built server you may have to handle it yourself. This process
varies wildly depending on your operating system and a variety of other
factors. Searching for php mail setup on Google will most likely start you
in the right direction.
Calling drupal_mail()
The following is the function that gets called when our confirmation form is
submitted (indicating that we should in fact send an e-mail warning to the
user in question).
/**
* Send a warning e-mail to the specified user.
*/
function user_warn_confirm_form_submit($form, &$form_state) {
$account = $form_state['values']['account'];
}
drupal_mail(
'user_warn',
'warn',
$account->mail,
user_preferred_language($account),
$form_state['values'],
variable_get('site_mail', NULL),
TRUE
);
As you can see, drupal_mail() requires that we pass it quite a bit of information.
Let's look at each of these arguments in detail:
• The first argument indicates what module should invoke hook_mail() to
send this message. We are setting this to 'user_warn' since we are doing
our own hook_mail() implementation. However, you can send a mail
implemented by another module if you need to. We will look at the
user_warn_mail() implementation in a bit.
[ 142 ]