PHP mail()
February 13, 2004
One of the main reasons I have not been posting everyday recently is because I was asked, or rather told, to make a web interface connected to a database on the backend for our employees to evaluate a new student information system being put in. This, of course, would require the use of PHP and fairly extensive use of it based on the parameters required by the project. I'm only in chapter 3 in my book, so I knew I was going to need to put in some hard time and long hours. The difficulty of the project was expounded because this was our first test on our new server. We had never even had the chance to test MySQL and make sure it was working, we had only run some minor scripts to test PHP.
After several days, I got it working like a charm. In fact, I even received a few compliments from some of the higher-ups telling me I did a good job on it and they were happy.
With my back still warm from all the patting, I sat back down in my chair anxious to work on a mail script. I wanted to write one that would function for all contact forms on our website. I knew what features I wanted from it. I knew what options I needed. All that I lacked was the knowledge (and probably a little confidence). After about 20 minutes, I felt I had it ready. I checked all the documentation and found a few minor configuration options that needed to be handled on the server, and tested it out.
The first test brought a Server Error. My server administrator couldn't work on it until yesterday. So, I had to wait almost a week. When he did get time to work on it, he found a small tweak that needed to be made. But then it worked like a charm. Now I can say I wrote a mail script that functioned from the very beginning. Sure, I changed a couple of things to add some functionality, but all in all it worked from the start.
This was probably a very boring post, but programming can be one of those things that either drives you absolutely nuts or makes you giddy as a school girl. Right now I might as well be wearing a plaid skirt. I should probably stop skipping down the hall of my office, huh?
P.S. The title of this post is the name of the function that is used for submitting mail in PHP.
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