Composer is a package manager for PHP much like gem is for ruby or npm is for node.

It allows you to define libraries that your application depends on and will install them for you as well a their own dependencies.

It also includes an autoloader to load classes in both the installed packages as well as your own classes.

In part 4 of Building a simple contact form in PHP we added a CAPCHA field to help reduce spam.

In this part we are going to change the sending of the mail to use SMTP by using Swift Mailer, a php mailing library.

In part 3 of Building a simple contact form in PHP we added client-side validation to our form.

In this part we are going to add a CAPTCHA field to the form in order to reduce spam.

As we last left it in part 2 of Building a simple contact form in PHP we added server-side form validation to our contact form and input filtering to the submitted data before sending out the email.

In this part we are going to add some client-side validation to our contact form.

In part 1 of Building a simple contact form in PHP we built a simple contact form that sends a notification when the form is posted with the values the user posted.

As we discussed at the end of part 1 there are a few problems with our contact form.

We are going to work on solving some of those problems.

In this series we will be building a simple contact form in php.

It will cover sending emails and form validation.

There is a lot of misinformation and uncertainty on the topic of password storage.

There are massive amounts of tutorials and articles recommending all manor of methods of storing passwords. A large number of these are old and using methods that just are up to snuff for todays security standards.

I previously wrote about switching from the mysql extension to PDO. PDO introduces a number of convenient features beyond the mysql extension such as transactions, prepared statements, and more fetching options. However there are still a few things that are a bit painful.

This article will introduce Doctrine DBAL to help alleviate some of these pain points.

Doctrine DBAL is a wrapper around PDO. It adds a few conveniences beyond straight PDO as well as a query builder.

The mysql extension has been marked as deprecated as of php 5.5.0 and will be removed completely in a future version.

It is old and not very user friendly.

This article will introduce PDO as a replacement.