How to set up your domain email with Google Apps

Google is already known as "king of the web" for extremely clean and simple design, fast loading, and delivering arguably the bestresults of any search engine. And which has one of the most widely used email services across the globe, Gmail. And if you are running website, you most have already used google's many features like webmasters, analytics, adwords, google apps etc. They are really great features for webmasters.

Here i am going to talk about google apps, I hope most of you have already heard about it. The Google Apps basic package is free and you be able to create upto 10 email addresses for your company like info[@]domain.com, support[@]domain.com, sales[@]domain.com and so on. It's reallly a great features for those who want few email address in free of cost and which is fully reliable. If you have many staffs in you office, you can get Google Apps for Business, which will provide unlimited email address with some extra features for you like 25GB email storage per user, BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook interoperability and more, SSO, forced SSL, custom password strength requirements and more, 99.9% uptime guarantee SLA and 24/7 support etc . But here i am going to talk about, how to set up free domain email addresses in google apps for you. Here are seven steps for you to configure the google apps:

Step One: Click here to start Google Apps.

Step Two: Click on the “Get Started” button for free service.

Step Three: Enter your domain name and go through the registration process.

Step Four: Once you have completed the registration process, you need to verify that you own the domain. You can do this through the following options:

1. Add a DNS record to your domain configuration.
2. Link to your Google Analytics account if you are already set up there.
3. Upload an HTML file to your server.
4. Add a meta tag to your site’s home page.

You can choose any one from the above options which feel you comfortable. 

Step Five: Now it is time to activate your email.

Step Six: Select your host site from the drop down menu to get instructions for changing your MX records. Log into your host, and follow the steps through completely. Then click on “I have completed these steps” at the bottom.

Step Seven: Once your MX records are official and correct, go to your Google Apps home page and sign in. Click on “Organization and Users” on the top navigation menu, and then “Create New User.” Add the name and email that you want, and continue to do this for as many emails as you wish to set up (up to 50 with this free version of google apps). Click on “Email Instructions” after creating a user to email the login information to whoever you created the email address for.

Now you can log into your email from http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainname/.

[Source Nirmal Blog]

User Signup using Facebook Data

Using facebook registration plug-in users can easily sign up on your website using facebook data. With one simple facebook login the form will be filled with user appropriate data. This plug-in is a simple iframe you can place it anywhere on your webpage. You can also add a custom field if facebook doesn’t have.

 1. Creating Facebook App

a) First step is to Create a Facebook App.
b) Give a name for the Application and agree the Terms and Conditions.
c) On the Web Site tab give the values for siteURL and site domain
d) Store the App ID and App Secret.

2. Designing the Database
  Create a table depending upon the fields we required in the registration process.

CREATE TABLE users
(
uid int(11) PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
fullname varchar(50),
email varchar(50) UNIQUE,
password varchar(50),
gender varchar(6),
dob varchar(16)
);

 

3. Designing the Registration Form

a) We are using iframe provided to by facebook to display registration form.
b) You all have to do is just replace client_id and redirect_uri with your Facebook App Id and the redirection url.
c) In this tutorial we are designing a form with name, email, password, gender, date of birth and captcha.

registration.php

<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="no" height="600" scrolling="auto" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/registration.php?
client_id=183620578322567&
redirect_uri=http://example.com/store_user_data.php?&
fields=[
{"name":"name"},
{"name":"email"},
{"name":"password"},
{"name":"gender"},
{"name":"birthday"},
{"name":"captcha"}
]"
scrolling="auto"
frameborder="no"
style="border: none;"
width="500"
height="600">
</iframe>

 

4. Reading and Storing the Callback Data

store_user_data.php

<?php
define('FACEBOOK_APP_ID', 'your_app_id'); // Place your App Id here
define('FACEBOOK_SECRET', 'your_app_secret'); // Place your App Secret Here

// No need to change the function body
function parse_signed_request($signed_request, $secret)
{
list($encoded_sig, $payload) = explode('.', $signed_request, 2);
// decode the data
$sig = base64_url_decode($encoded_sig);
$data = json_decode(base64_url_decode($payload), true);
if (strtoupper($data['algorithm']) !== 'HMAC-SHA256')
{
error_log('Unknown algorithm. Expected HMAC-SHA256');
return null;
}

// check sig
$expected_sig = hash_hmac('sha256', $payload, $secret, $raw = true);
if ($sig !== $expected_sig)
{
error_log('Bad Signed JSON signature!');
return null;
}
return $data;
}
function base64_url_decode($input)
{
return base64_decode(strtr($input, '-_', '+/'));
}
if ($_REQUEST)
{
$response = parse_signed_request($_REQUEST['signed_request'],
FACEBOOK_SECRET);

$name = $response["registration"]["name"];
$email = $response["registration"]["email"];
$password = $response["registration"]["password"];
$gender = $response["registration"]["gender"];
$dob = $response["registration"]["birthday"];

// Connecting to database
mysql_connect('DATABASE_HOST', 'YOUR_USERNAME', 'YOUR_PASSWORD');
mysql_select_db('YOUR_DATABASE');

// Inserting into users table
$result = mysql_query("INSERT INTO users (name, email, password, gender, dob) VALUES ('$name', '$email', '$password', '$gender', '$dob')");

if($result){
// User successfully stored
}
else
{
// Error in storing
}
}
else
{
echo '$_REQUEST is empty';
}
?>

 

Adding a custom field

f you want to request user for additional information that facebook may not have then add a custom field in JSON string.

{"name":"phone", "description":"Phone Number", "type":"text"}