Chapter 4. User Interaction and Email Automation

Up until now, we have covered the basics for you to get a dynamic web site up and running. One thing that we have not looked at yet is the creation of forms. Symfony incorporates a subframework that handles forms, which once mastered, makes creating forms an enjoyable task. In this chapter we are going to see how easy it is to create and validate forms by creating a newsletter signup module for our web site. In the previous chapter we looked at plugins and learnt how useful they can be. Therefore, we will then convert our new module into a plugin so that we can use it with other projects.

By the end of this chapter you will know how to:

• Add a third-party library to send automated emails

• Create and modify Propel-based forms

• Use flash variables

• Create a plugin and package it up for redistribution

The signup module

We want to provide the users with the functionality to enter their name, email address, and how they found our web site. We want all this...