How to input table html to PHP email code - php

Question

This is my current code:
and I want to add a number of tables to change the design of the email, I am very new to PHP and ZEND any help would be great thanks.

Answer 1

As Mike Brant said, you can create your HTML then copy in inline. However you will then need to ensure that the email is sent with the proper mime-type so that the user's email reader knows to render as HTML and not as plain text. It isn't that hard, but I found that the PEAR mail and mail_mime libraries really make it even easier and more obvious what's being done. There are also some 3rd party email apis, for example I've had good success on one project using http://swiftmailer.org/

Answer 2

The best way to start is to just layout your email in HTML the way you want it and then just copy into your HEREDOC section and replace the content with the variables.

Answer 3

Create one (zend)layout for your e-mails like you do it for your website. Best with html 4.0 doctype. Avoid CSS. Most E-Mail Clients cannot render it correctly. If you have to use CSS, embed it into style-tags (no external content) and embed the style-Tag into the body. (most web-mailers are dropping the head-section).
Now create views for every mail-type you want to send (e.g.: registration, pw-lost,...)
assign the variables to the view and render it into the layout. Render the Layout into Zend-Email Object.
If you want to manage the content, subject, sender,... over an administration-area, just create a table with the following colums:
type (can be registration, pw-Lost...)
Subject
From
To (for mails which are adressed to the admin e.g.: when users post comments)
CC
Bcc
Html-Text (the Text of the e-Mail with Place-Holders for personalzation)
Text (optional plain text containing Place-Holders) you can pack this text additionaly to you html-Mail or just send html or Text Depending on the user settings.
Some extra-colums for attachments (optional)
Now you can adminster the different Mails and drop your views (not the layout).
At least create a mail-class which you can access in that way:
$mail = new My_Mail(My_Mail::PW_LOST);
$mail->bind($userData); // will replace the placeholders in the text
$mail->addTo(...);
$mail->send(); // will replace the placeholders in the text, renders the layout, Sends the mail.
Code-Sample:
I can provide code samples on saturday if you are interested

Answer 4

You can use the Zend_Mail class (Zend/Mail.php) to send emails. The details are in the code sample below:
$mail = new Zend_Mail();
$mail->setBodyText($bodyText);
$mail->setBodyHtml($bodyHtml);
$mail->setFrom($senderAddress, $senderLabel);
$mail->addTo($recipientAddress, $recipientLabel);
$mail->setSubject($subject);
$mail->send();
A question you might have is how the email (text and html) contents are assigned to $bodyText and $bodyHtml. You can create a couple of phtml files one for html content and the other for text. See the code below on how to achieve this:
$this->view->fullname = "John Abc";
$this->view->emaildata = $data //Possibly an array of data from the db
$bodyText = $this->view->render('emails/htmlemail.phtml')
$bodyHtml = $this->view->render('emails/textemail.phtml')
Note: This snippet should be above the previous one.
Hope this answers your questions. Happy coding :)