Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

The Lithium framework is a very flexible framework and it gets along quite well with other classes. It has auto-loading features and utilizes namespaces in PHP 5.3. So any class or library of classes is typically pretty easy to use. Take for example the wonderful Swiftmailer project. This library makes sending mail via mail, sendmail, or any smtp server (including Gmail) very easy. 

So how does one get it working with Lithium? Quite easy. You can simply move all of the Swiftmailer files into a folder under your app's libraries folder, named something like "swiftmailer" ... Why not? Obvious enough. Under there you should have a lib folder with all of Swiftmailer's classes and it's auto-loader. 

Great. You're actually half done. The next half is to include the Swiftmailer library and auto-loader in your bootstrap. You could of course also just follow the directions on the Swiftmailer site and run require_once(...); somewhere in your method of some class, but we want to do things the Lithium way. So use Libraries:add('swiftmailer'); instead. Though, we will need to pass some options to bootstrap that auto-loader. 

Libraries::add('swiftmailer', array(
     'bootstrap' => 'lib/swift_required.php'
     )
);

That's all there is to it. Now you can use Swiftmailer anywhere in your application. You just should note that you're working with namespaces in Lithium and the Swiftmailer class doesn't use a namespace within your application. So you'll need to call its classes like so:

$transport = \Swift_MailTransport::newInstance();
$mailer = \Swift_Mailer::newInstance($transport);
$message = \Swift_Message::newInstance()            
              //Give the message a subject
              ->setSubject('Test Message')
            
              //Set the From address with an associative array
              ->setFrom(array('your@email.com' => 'Your Name'))
            
              //Set the To addresses with an associative array
              ->setTo(array('to@email.com'))
            
              //Give it a body
              ->setBody('Here is the message itself')
            
              //And optionally an alternative body
              ->addPart('Here is the message itself', 'text/html');
              $result = $mailer->send($message);

This would send a message using mail(). You can refer to the Swiftmailer documentation for other usages, but you'll just need to remember to add the first \ slash so you're in the proper namespace. You can also put the "use" command at the top of your class like this:

namespace whatever\may\have;
use \Swift_Mailer;
use \Swift_Message;
use \Swift_MailTransport;

class whatever extends something {
}

Then you won't have to remember the beginning slash to use the classes and when you follow (or copy and paste) from the Swiftmailer documentation, you won't have to really adjust much or think about it. I don't mind adding the slash personally, I don't like to put "use" up top in this case because you're talking about a few different classes that you will be using (the "Mailer", "Message", and "MailTransport") and I just find it a hassle and just makes me write more. Additionally, I may only have one method that actually uses those classes.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone out there with using Swiftmailer with Lithium. I'm sure it's fairly obvious, but that bootstrap feature is really cool and I wanted to put it out there for those not familiar with the framework or those who didn't take advantage of the auto-loader with Swiftmailer and Lithium. There are actually several ways you can use Swiftmailer (and other 3rd party classes for that matter) with Lithium. I just really like how Lithium keeps things consistent with the Libraries::add(); method.