PHP - Sending e-mail data from a server's localhost

This is a fun example I created from following some tutorials on YouTube. I have built SMTP servers in previous examples, but this can be used to send e-mails from a webpage to a server for contracts or something as simple as a guestbook where an admin would like to have a system send automated e-mails to marketing, sales or management teams.

I used the PHPMailer library found on GitHub for the backend processing. For the front page I just made a simple form where the user can send a resume to a recruiter.

         

And don't worry this won't just let you put any name in the email text box. The e-mails need to come from a legitimate source such as the secured website where this will be hosted in production. The above was rendered from the code below. Nothing fancy here, just a simple form for submitting attachments. 

Success! The form works as intended and I got the test e-mail in my Gmail inbox from my test server.

PHP & jQuery - File/image uploader

For this example I created a page where a user can upload files & images to a web server. The items are stored and reflected so the user can see their multiple uploads. With PHP below I am handling the uploads and if the file already exists the user is notified that they are trying to do a duplicate upload.

And here this is defining the main work being done by this page. This is handling the file type to only allow images with extensions of: .gif, .jpg, .png, .jpeg. The size is also restricted to 500KB.

This is what the page looks like below with a little formatting. The alert below was triggered by trying to upload a file without one of the allowed extensions.

This is now echoing back to the screen the file size restrictions because an excessively large file was being uploaded.

In this block I create the div tags for the "dropZone" above and set the input type to handle the multiple attachments as an array.

And now below you can see what the page looks like after multiple successful image file uploads. The completion stage of the file uploads are shown during the upload. With this a user can upload images to a CRM system for sales, a profile picture for social media or a variety of other systems. The file types and sizes here were customized so this same format can be used to upload any file type of any size.

Using Google reCAPTCHA v2

What is a reCAPTCHA? You have seen them online and perhaps have been wondering how they work. I know I have been seeing these for years but didn't really understand them until I saw the process. In this example I don't go into the creation of the system behind reCAPTCHA's, but rather here I am just showing how to use the Google reCAPTCHA v2. I have seen these used ubiquitously all over the internet and I decided to learn what they are and how I can implement them on my own sites to verify that my site's users are indeed people and not bots.

The PHP is pretty standard. I send the API a user's name, Key, response Key and IP address. Then I get the file contents, decode the JSON and verify a user's authenticity.

PHP CODE:

HTML CODE:

The HTML code for this example is just a simple sample text box form for a user's name, this can be for a username, email or even to verify if a survey is being taken by a human rather than by a bot. The uses for this are endless and that is why you can find these all over the internet.

This next part had me stuck for a moment, I had been referencing some old tutorials and now Google has buttoned down their security for this a bit. To get the correct responses the site needs to be served over HTTPS. I quickly added an SSL cert with Let's Encrypt and now it works properly. Here in this screenshot you can see a simple form box where you can enter your name. Once a user clicks the reCAPTCHA and it verifies that they are not a bot the request is accepted and I am just echoing back the user input. For an application or website I would just pipe the output to whatever database or other page rather than the echo which is done here for illustrative purposes below.

I included this to show the flow of reCAPTCHA although most people have probably seen this as they explore the internet.

Upon successful completion of the above little exercise the system authenticates that a user is authentic or not. Here since the reCAPTCHA was completed successfully and I entered my name as 'J', the system tells me it verified that I'm not a bot and that is has captured my name as 'J'. This system is particularly interesting because its initial purpose was to help digitize illegible books and now it's used to verify users as humans. So not only did I learn some cool PHP tricks while learning how to do this, I also learned a little more about internet history.