Professional PHP developer

Being a leader is a complex full time job. Either by being a leader for a school class, your chess club or even a company. There’s no big difference between all of this leadership roles.

1. Nothing to do with the job title

There’s no such thing of being a leader just because someone made you a CEO, CFO, or any other fancy job title on your business card and email signatures, this has nothing to do with leadership. continue reading…

Been a while without writing on this blog, wasn’t the work, neither the lack of time, was just too much distraction. I am now celebrating 18 months and some days working as independent contractor, and I must admit, what a roller coaster has been. Since i left the great adventure that was GuestCentric and my many great friends i left there, worked on so many projects and so many people, i can’t remember all now, there were great moments to remember and others no so good.

Working as independent contractor has pro’s and con’s, will try to enumerate some below.

Pro’s

Flexible schedule and working hours

As independent, there is one thing i don’t give up, i have my own schedule and working hours, and i work on the days i want, as long as i deliver what i agree with the customer, in terms of deadlines and deliverables, all good.

continue reading…

If you are a developer and need to login into Magento admin area, you’ll get sick of popup notifications messages all the time. Removing such messages is a straigh forward process.

Just go to System -> Configuration

Select Advanced from the bottom left column

Look for Mage_AdminNotification option, and select Disable from the drop-down.

And that’s it.

Let me know what tips do you want to see about magento.

I had slowed down the pace i blog, mainly because i made the decision long time ago to write more complete content on this blog and use micro blogging, mainly Twitter, for more short posts, now i realize that i was wrong and i will go back with my decision and start to post more instant content on this blog because:

1. I like to blog
2. I use the blog as my personal notebook
3. Is easier to find the content on my blog than on Twitter
4. Is easier to keep a discussion using comment system

Saying this, i really like to blog, and i will do it often! Even if i will keep using twitter and other social media networks!

This post has been inspired by Chris Shiflet Ideas Of March (#ideasofmarch) blog post.

Sending emails using Zend_Mail component from Zend Framework is an easy as it can get task. On a recent project, i needed to configure Zend_Mail to work with Google Smtp server.

Here is a quick how to:

$settings = array('ssl'=>'ssl',
                                'port'=>465,
                                'auth' => 'login',
                                'username' => 'youremail@gmail.com',
                                'password' => 'YOUR_PASSWORD');
                $transport = new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp('smtp.gmail.com', $settings);
                $email_from = "YOUR_EMAIL";
                $name_from = "YOUR NAME";
                $email_to = "TO_EMAIL";
                $name_to = "TO NAME";
 
                $mail = new Zend_Mail ();
                $mail->setReplyTo($email_from, $name_from);
                $mail->setFrom ($email_from, $name_from);
                $mail->addTo ($email_to, $name_to);
                $mail->setSubject ('Testing email using google accounts and Zend_Mail');
                $mail->setBodyText ("Email body");
                $mail->send($transport);

Don’t even bother to add a different email to $email_from than your Google email, because Google will override your settings by you account email.

Update: Got a tip from Bruno Pedro, Google has smtp sending limits, you can only send up to 500 emails using a Google standard account. Read the Google answer on this limiting issue, for more info.

For a more detailed look, just check out Zend_Mail component page.