Fox Valley Computing Professionals

Typically on Fridays, when I have time, I try to do a bit of online research and perusal to see what's new out there in Web/PHP land. I discovered two new (well, to me anyhow) items that I found interesting.

Magento

Magento is a commercial open source eCommerce Platform that looks incredibly promising. Since I'm in the public sector, I don't get to play with things like this much. I wonder if anyone else has used this for a client or your own business. If so, I'd be interested in your experience, or perhaps we could even get someone to demo or run a tutorial on setting up a Magento site at one of our meetings.

For those not familiar with Magento, you can find out more about it from the Magento website.

Swift Mailer

I've had my share of problems with using the php mail() function on a Windows server. I've also tried PHPMailer before. Not really impressed with either. Lately, for a non-profit I'm involved with, I've been using a PHP application called Pommo for doing mass mailings, email subscriber lists, etc. Its still in alpha and has its quirks but it is pretty cool.

The developer appears to be leaning towards integrating Pommo with Swift Mailer, so I checked out the Swift Mailer site and it looks like a really nice OO library for mail handling. As I have a lightweight mail function built into some admin tools here at work, I think I'll look at replacing it with Swift Mailer, which appears to be much more robust.

Again, it might be nice to see a demo/tutorial on Swift Mailer sometime in the future, perhaps in conjunction with using it to do mass mailings in multi-part format in support of a commercial or non-profit website.

Swift Mailer website