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Form Submission


Question

After finding several unclear methods to submit an HTML form online, including what's found at w3, I've decided to ask here.

The form that I currently have is a bit weak, as it's a <form action="mailto:blah@blah.com"> and I'd rather something that 1. doesn't show the email address it's sending to, and 2. gives you a "thank you for your submission" screen.

I tried looking into some CGI thing, but I couldn't get it - Though, I did eventually figure out the jquery thing I was looking into before.

the website is: http://www.esu.edu/d2l

I gave the form.html file to my supervisor, but I don't know if he uploaded it to the server just yet.

Thanks.

EDIT: As it's not uploaded (and my supervisor's a bit busy), I'll just include the code:

&lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
&lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
&lt;head&gt;
    &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /&gt;
    &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" /&gt;
    &lt;link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favico.png" /&gt;
    &lt;link href="css/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /&gt;
    &lt;title&gt;D2L Help Website&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;/head&gt;
&lt;body class="main" topmargin="0" marginheight="0"&gt;
    &lt;center&gt;    &lt;img src="images/banner.jpg" alt="" /&gt;    
    &lt;table class="tbl"&gt;
    &lt;tr&gt;
        &lt;td class="list" valign="top"&gt;
            &lt;form action="mailto:_blank_@esu.edu" method="post" enctype="text/plain"&gt;
            Name: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;input type="text" name="name" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
            Email: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;input type="text" name="email" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
            Phone: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;input type="text" name="phone" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
            Best Time to Contact You: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;input type="text" name="time" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;br /&gt;
            Type of problem:&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="checkbox" name="problem" value="login" /&gt; Logging In&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="checkbox" name="problem" value="uploading" /&gt; Uploading&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="checkbox" name="problem" value="quizzes" /&gt; Quizzes&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="checkbox" name="problem" value="other" /&gt; Other&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;br /&gt;
            Description of the Problem:&lt;br/&gt;
            &lt;textarea rows="5" cols="30" name="description" value="description"&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt;
            &lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="submit" value="Submit"&gt;
            &lt;input type="reset" value="Reset"&gt;

            &lt;/form&gt;
        &lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;/tr&gt;
    &lt;/table&gt;
    &lt;/center&gt;
&lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;

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Yeah, form submission by mailto is a horrible way to do it. You need the form to be submitted to and processed by a "server-side application". Normally these will be created with a "server-side scripting (programming) language" like PHP or ASP.net. So firstly, you need to establish which of these your webserver has, and if neither, you need to get someone to install and set it up. Second, you need someone to write a small server-side application for you that'll take the form data, process it, and store it somewhere (most likely a database), and there are many people here like myself who could help you with that if they have some free time.

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Sounds like you would really benefit from Dagon's secure PHP form mailer assuming the server has PHP/MySQL. Which I think you it does since I forced a 404 on the page and it brought up Apache 1.3.26.

See a problem with installing things like this is that I'm not an employee here. I'm in an internship that has nothing to do with the webserver, so I'm limited to what I can do.

My goal was to upgrade this from the OLD website, which was a giant image with mouseovers, like 1999 web programming... and bad 1999 web programming...

Thank you though. I'll talk to my boss if we can do anything like that.

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Uhm, you don't "install" anything here. You upload the files, you edit the config for it so that it utilize the email they get sent to and then the options you want enabled/disabled.

That's it. There is no "installation".

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Oh... I guess I misunderstood the directions... :-/

O.O

* 1) Download and uncompress dd-formmailer.zip

* 2) Upload the entire dd-formmailer directory to your server

* 4) Configure your options (explained below)

* 5) Add the form to your page (explained below)

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:blink: Err, lol the directions explain what you have to do... Don't see how the word 'installation' changes that?

Edit: Anyway that's your only option for the form--you HAVE to upload a file that will contain your form values so you can send it out. So either just upload that or use a 3rd party resource that has you embed the form via iframe (Wufoo.)

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Just threw me off...

I guess what I'm having a hard time now with is, I have no idea where to put the code in my form? Mind you, web design wasn't ever something I studied... I started it at the beginning of this internship to get something else out of it... I knew HTML3 before August... This new stuff confuses me...

Am I linking to the PHP file from my form.html? or is the link to the submission page linking directly to the PHP?

I just get a whole lot of text when I link directly to the PHP... not quite sure what to do here.

I think the instructions are geared to people who have at least had a basic knowledge of PHP... I have nothing.

Code now looks like this in form.html with the dd-formmailer folder in the same folder as the form.

            &lt;form action="dd-formmailer/dd-formmailer.php" method="post"&gt;
            Name: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;input type="text" name="name" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
            Email: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;input type="text" name="email" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
            Phone: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;input type="text" name="phone" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
            Best Time to Contact You: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;input type="text" name="time" /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;br /&gt;
            Type of problem:&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="checkbox" name="problem" value="login" /&gt; Logging In&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="checkbox" name="problem" value="uploading" /&gt; Uploading&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="checkbox" name="problem" value="quizzes" /&gt; Quizzes&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="checkbox" name="problem" value="other" /&gt; Other&lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;br /&gt;
            Description of the Problem:&lt;br/&gt;
            &lt;textarea rows="5" cols="30" name="description" value="description"&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt;
            &lt;br /&gt;
            &lt;input type="submit" value="Submit"&gt;
            &lt;input type="reset" value="Reset"&gt;

            &lt;/form&gt;

I'm sure I have to change item names and such... but I'm just staring at all this right now, without a clue as to what I should do first, honestly.

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Alright so I just tossed it together really quick:

http://dev.icupcake.org/neowin/sonata.php -- You can see the form is there. When you submit it blank, you'll get errors. You can't actually submit (well okay you can) as the email I used is fake so I won't receive a form.

http://dev.icupcake.org/neowin/sonata.rar -- That's the archive of what I did really quick. All it is, is the form uploaded and configured for standalone usage and the form values tossed into your original page. You'll still need to edit dd-formmailer.php's configuration as I just changed a few quick things. :)

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Oh wow... that makes a LOT more sense to me. I don't have time today, but I'll get working on that Thursday when I'm here again. For now, I just have about 15 minutes before I leave, so no can do now... but yeah...

Much obliged. Thank you soooo much.

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Oy so after that, and I tinkered with the code, I get bad news from the web manager here: we do not support PHP on our server. LAME!

He said I should write it in PERL, as we do support that.

Off to MORE adventures!

Any advice on where to start?

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