PROFESSIONal from VITA BREVIS FILMS on Vimeo.

Metal-fabricator Neil Youngberg never planned on taking over his grandfather’s business and is now faced with passing on his legacy.

In this short-form profile, VitaBrevisFilms interviews Neil Youngberg for the beginning exploration of our “Professional” series. Shot on location in Neil’s metal fabrication shop, the 3rd generation craftsman gives a sincere overview of his life’s work, dispensing hard-worn wisdom while illuminating the sobering realities of the role private business plays in an ever changing economic landscape. A deeply personal project for all involved, this on-going series seeks to shed-light on forgotten trades and practices in an evolving America.

My favorite part is below:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?

Or, in other words:

What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?

Tough questions that I don’t have answers for. Yet.

WHERE’S THE MONEY GEORGE ? from oizo mr on Vimeo.

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

There are some existing PHP libraries for Postmark available, but none that integrated elegantly with our CakePHP based application. So I took a few minutes and whipped up a simple Postmark CakePHP component which I’ve made available on Github.

Configuration

Add the following keys to your configuration:

Configure::write('Postmark.uri', 'http://api.postmarkapp.com/email');
Configure::write('Postmark.key', '810de23c-5ffb-44d9-a424-7a4a5c0fba1a');

If you want your connection to Postmark to be encrypted, simply change the uri to use https.

Make sure to modified the API key to match the credentials for your Postmark server rack instance.

Usage

This component extends the base CakePHP email component, and works virtually the same.

Place the postmark.php file in your app/controllers/components/ folder.

In your controller, make sure the component is available:

public $components = array('Postmark');

Then, simply send messages like this:

$this->Postmark->delivery = 'postmark';
$this->Postmark->from = 'sender@domain.com';
$this->Postmark->to = 'recipient@domain.com';
$this->Postmark->subject = 'this is the subject';
$messageBody = 'this is the message body';
$this->Postmark->send($messageBody);

You can also use the following optional attributes:

$this->Postmark->cc = array('recipient@domain.com');
$this->Postmark->bcc = array('recipient@domain.com');
$this->Postmark->replyTo = 'sender@domain.com';

The syntax of all parameters is the same as the default CakePHP email component.

There is one additional attribute which can be used for setting the Postmark tag property:

$this->Postmark->tag = 'contact';

Debugging

You can see the response from Postmark in the return value when you send a message:

$result = $this->Postmark->send($messageBody);
$this->log($result, 'debug');

If there are any errors, they’ll be included in the response. See the Postmark API documentation for error code detail.

Conclusion

Hopefully others will find this useful. If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions, please let me know! Here’s a link to the code: Postmark CakePHP Component on GitHub.