html-form « WordPress.com Tag Feed

CSS text-indent: An Excellent Trick To Style Your HTML Form

Jeff Cemer — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:35:24 +0000

Add some style to your HTML forms

I ran across this article at AEXT Design Magazine yesterday and thought I’d share it with you.

CSS text-indent: An Excellent Trick To Style Your HTML Form

I never thought of using CSS text-indent with forms before.

PHP $_POST Array Not Working

martcon — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:41:17 +0000

When using PHP, it is common for scripts to accept parameters from HTML forms. For example if we have a HTML form as follows:

Name: <input type=”text” name=”the_name” />

Address: <input type=”text” name=”the_address” />

</form>

This is a simple HTML form that accepts a name (called the_name) and address (called the_address).

A simple PHP script could print out these parameters as follows:

<?php

echo $_POST['the_name'].”<br />”;
echo $_POST['the_address'].”<br />”;

This will print out the name and address passed from the HTML form to the PHP script.

However, in certain cases this will not work i.e. the script will print nothing. The workaround is to use the $_REQUEST function which contains the contents of the $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE functions. Generally, the problem is caused by a programmer error in the HTML file e.g. the name of a form element is omitted. Also, it has been found that if the Content-Type is empty or not recognised in the HTTP message then the PHP $_POST array will be empty.

Simple PHP + MySQL form with radio button and dropdown list

ykyuen — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:20:55 +0000

First, create a MySQL database with the following table

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS 'data' (
  'id' int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  'english_name' varchar(50) collate utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  'tel_number' varchar(8) collate utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  'email_address' varchar(50) collate utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  'gender' varchar(1) collate utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  'age' varchar(10) collate utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  'region' varchar(10) collate utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;

Prepare a update.php for the MySQL connection.

<?php
	$english_name = $_POST['EnglishName'];
	$tel_number = $_POST['TelNumber'];
	$email_address = $_POST['EmailAddress'];
	$gender = $_POST['Gender'];
	$age = $_POST['Age'];
	$region = $_POST['Region'];

	mysql_connect("[mysql_server]", "[username]", "[password]") or die ('Error: ' . mysql_error());
	mysql_select_db("[database_name]");

	$query="INSERT INTO data (english_name, tel_number, email_address, gender, age, region) VALUES (";
	$query.="'".$english_name."', ";
	$query.="'".$tel_number."', ";
	$query.="'".$email_address."', ";
	$query.="'".$gender."', ";
	$query.="'".$age."', ";
	$query.="'".$region."')";

	mysql_query($query) or die ('Error updating database');

	echo "Record is inserted.";
?>

Prepare the form.php

<html>
<head>
	<title>Simple PHP Form</title>
</head>

<body>
	<form method="post" action="update.php">
		<table>
			<tr>
				<td>English Name:</td>
				<td><input type="text" name="EnglishName" size="50" /></td>
				<td>Tel Number:</td>
				<td><input type="text" name="TelNumber" size="8" /></td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
				<td>Email Address:</td>
				<td><input type="text" name="EmailAddress" size="50" /></td>
				<td>Gender:</td>
				<td><input type="radio" name="Gender" value="M" checked="checked" />M<input type="radio" name="Gender" value="F" />F</td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
				<td>Age:</td>
				<td colspan="3">
					<input type="radio" name="Age" value="Under 18" checked="checked" />Under 18
					<input type="radio" name="Age" value="18-23" />18-23
					<input type="radio" name="Age" value="24-30" />24-30
					<input type="radio" name="Age" value="31-40" />31-40
					<input type="radio" name="Age" value="Over 40" />Over 40
				</td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
				<td>Region:</td>
				<td>
					<select name="Region">
						<option value="N/A">N/A</option>
						<option value="HK">Hong Kong</option>
						<option value="KLN">Kowloon</option>
					</select>
				</td>
			</tr>
			<tr>
				<td colspan="4"><input type="Submit" value="Submit" /></td>
			</tr>
		</table>
	</form>
</body>

</html>

Done =)

HTML Form Hazırlama (eposta gönder)

PHP'ci — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:39:04 +0000

Basit düzeyde bir HTML formu ve formdan alınan verileri eposta atacak bir PHP sayfası nasıl hazırlanır?

Öncelikle içerisinde formu bulunduracak olan HTML sayfasını hazırlayalım.

ÖRNEK KOD [iletisim.html]

<form id=”form1″ name=”form1″ method=”post” action=”iletisim.php“>
<table width=”455″ border=”1″>
<tr>
<td width=”242″><div align=”right”>Adiniz Soyadiniz :</div></td>
<td width=”197″>
<label>
<input type=”text” name=”isim” id=”textfield” />
</label> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><div align=”right”>E-posta adresiniz:</div></td>
<td>
<label>
<input type=”text” name=”eposta” id=”textfield2″ />
</label> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><div align=”right”>Konu:</div></td>
<td>
<label>
<input type=”text” name=”konu” id=”textfield3″ />
</label> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><div align=”right”>Mesaj:</div></td>
<td><label>
<textarea name=”mesaj” cols=”30″ rows=”5″></textarea>
</label></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><div align=”right”></div></td>
<td><label>
<input type=”submit” name=”button” id=”button” value=”Gönder ” />
</label></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>

Daha sonra da formdan gönderilerin verileri alıp, alınan verileri istediğimiz eposta adresine yollayacak olan PHP sayfasını oluşturalım.

ÖRNEK KOD [iletisim.php]

<?php
$to = “eposta adresim “;
$subject = “Iletisim Formu”;

$headers = “From:” . $_POST["isim"];
$headers .= “<” . $_POST["eposta"] . “>\r\n”;
$headers .= “Reply-To: ” . $_POST["eposta"] . “\r\n”;
$headers .= “Return-Path: ” . $_POST["eposta"];

$message .= “Sitenizden gelen iletisim form islem sonucu\n\n”;
$message .= “Adi soyadi: ” . $_POST["isim"] . “\r\n”;
$message .= “Email: ” . $_POST["eposta"] . “\r\n”;
$message .= “Konu: ” . $_POST["konu"] . “\r\n”;
$message .= “mesaj: ” . $_POST["mesaj"] . “\r\n”;

$mail_kontrol=mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

if ($mail_kontrol) {echo “Yollama başarılı”;}
else {echo “Mesaj Yollama hatası”;}
?>

The best online storage way

mytaskhelper — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:20:28 +0000

This post has moved, please Go To My Task Helper New Blog

Hidden Complexities [part 1]

peterpotter — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:47:43 +0000

Just yesterday, I finished the new module assigned to me last week. Below is the first part of Hidden Complexities: things I faced while developing the User Account Management module. Hope you get something out of it.

Creating the User Account Management module wasn’t as easy as it first seemed. You would get deceived because of its striking simplicity: it has only one page and it is plain HTML and PHP, no Javascript or AJAX. I was wrong.

There was no special scripting alright, but the behavior of this one page was different from other modules I have created before. Initially, upon visiting the page, a text box and a button should appear. This is where you type the account name or the login name of the user(Picture 1).

Picture 1

It should catch the instance when an input account name does not exist(Pictures 2 and 3).

Picture 2

Picture 3

When an existing account name is entered, the information for the account should appear below it(Picture 4).

Picture 4

Now, it isn’t much of a trouble, really, to display more elements on a single page after clicking a submit button. The trouble is, the added portion of the page contains a submit button itself and also, the input portion above must still function properly even with the added display.

We’ll have to go technical to see the real misery of the situation. To determine whether or not to display added information on the page, I put a condition in the view: if the controller passes an account (with the required information), display the account information, otherwise, don’t. The next scenario is the harder part. If you click ‘Load User Info‘, it should display the account info if the account exists. If you click ‘Update‘, it should save the checked modules to the account. Problem is, how will the controller know what to do when a submit button is clicked? The thing about submit buttons is that you can only specify where it redirects through the action attribute of the form where it belongs. Thus, if two submits belong to the same form, they go to the same page and there’s no elegant way to know which button is pressed (or so I think).

One work around, which I deem unelegant, would be to use Javascript to change a hidden input when either of the buttons are pressed. The buttons would give different values to the hidden input, let’s say ‘L’ when the ‘Load User Info‘ button is pressed and ‘U’ when the other is clicked. The controller would then determine which was pressed by checking the value of the hidden input.

A better solution (a no-Javascript one) is to place the submit buttons in separate forms. The different values of ‘action’ of the forms would now distinguish which button is pressed. For the ‘Load User Info‘ button, I had it pass ‘LOAD’ to the controller; for the ‘Update‘ button, I had it pass ‘UPDATE’. Now, the controller knows which button was pressed through the value of the parameter it receives. More elegant, don’t you think?

Actually, this would not have been a dilemma if, after clicking the ‘Load User Info‘ button, the information is displayed on a different page (do you see why?). Then, we could put a link to the account-name-input page so that the user could enter another account name. But then again, the specs must be followed, as we know

So, the multiple submit-buttons-with-different-functions -all-on-one-page problem is solved. As it turned out though, the controller took much more thinking to appear elegant….

[part 2: Arranging code in the controller such that the two forms function properly, and still remains elegant]

~Peter

an email form - tell a friend

form1 — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 07:34:38 +0000

an email “tell a friend” form is used frequently nowadays, for recommending sites and products via emails. it is a ctually an auto response email form.
once you enter a site you like you can use its “tell a friend” email form by entering your friend’s email address and sending him a small message. the site’s url is of course sent along with these details.
creating a “tell a friend” form using an email form builder is easy. all you actually need in the form is some text that explains what this form is about, an email element so the form filler can enter the friend’s email address and a submit button to send the data of the form.
steps to create such a form with a form builder:
Steps to create a “tell a friend” form :
1) Enter the form creator.
2) Drag a Label element in to the design area and enter text explaining what the form is about. For example: Please enter your friends email address in order to recommend this site to him/her.
3) Drag another Label element and enter the text “Friends email address”.
4) Drag an Email element, place it next to the label and go to its element settings.
5) Enter the text “Friends email address” in the element “caption” field.
6) Make sure that it’s defined as mandatory and that its “Send Copy” checkbox is turned on. This checkbox is in charge of sending an email to the address entered by a user in the email element.
7) Go to the “Form Settings” and fill in a message in the “Email User Message” field. This message will appear at the beginning of the email sent to friends.
Make sure you use [n] when you want to create a line break. For example: Hi,[n]I wanted to tell you about this great site i found[n]Its called FormLogix.
Add a submit button.
9) Save the form.

There is hope yet!

jpiemeisl — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:42:23 +0000

I switched over my mailing address today and stumbled upon something that inspired hope for the inter-webs.

It’s brilliantly designed and it’s effortless to navigate. Unfortunately it’s use wasn’t successful, my billing address differed from my current address. I assumed they would have thought that one out. Oh well, at least the form was sweet.

Googlebot becomes Spambot

Olli — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:05:27 +0000

Google seems to go one step too far. So they fill out forms with random words on websites and submit

DYI with a form builder - create your online web forms easily

form1 — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 06:57:57 +0000

if you are a blogger or simply own a web site you are aware of the fact that the best way of interacting with your users is through
web based forms (AKA online form).
adding a web form into your web site or blog is not an easy task, its time consuming and its requires a technical involment.
you will have to meet with a web developer, explain to him what you need, and when ever you will need to change something in this web form you will have to ask him to change it.
you will also need a database storage and some reports, thats cost money!
thats why i came with this idea, create a highly flexible form builde , untill now building web forms is not easy as it should be!
from now, anyone that got basic computer skills (drag and drop..) will be able to build web form, using the form builder will not just shortern your time to market but will also save you money…
i will be happy if you guys will check out my form builder and send me your feedbacks,
FormLogix Form Builder.

Styling Form Submit Buttons

ukmagician — Tue, 15 May 2007 16:13:47 +0000

The default form submit button looks ugly on almost any website. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to style it to fit in with your design?

Even better, how about adding a hover effect to make it clear that clicking on it does something?

After a bit of searching, I’ve found the solution at www.digital-web.com – using the <button> tag. With the addition of some javascript to cope with IE’s lack of support for the :hover pseudo class, you can even have hover effects.

Check out the excellent virtual Christmas card example at digital-web.com to see how far you can go with this.

Contact Options

ukmagician — Tue, 01 May 2007 09:40:49 +0000

A lot of businesses on the web seem to make it hard for people to contact them, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes in an effort to combat spam.

They make the user use a contact form on their website, which can be over complicated or require information that a casual enquirer doesn’t want to give. Email addresses are obscured in an effort to confuse email harvesters and succeed in confusing users as well. Or contact information is just too hard to find.

In my opinion, if you are selling a product or service that requires people to get in contact with you, you need to provide every opportunity for them to do so and not hinder them in any way. Provide a phone number, email address and enquiry form. Any anti spam measures you need to take should happen in the background.

A lot of web developers and web designers (professional and amateur alike) forget that not everyone is as web savvy as them, not everyone is great at typing or filling in forms, or has any idea why you might want to protect yourself from ’spam’ (tinned processed meat?). Some people may think that their enquiry is so unique a website form just can’t handle it and will want a simple email address, or they may just want to find a phone number and speak to someone.

Make the most of all the hard work involved in getting users to your site and make it easy to convert them.

So here are a couple of ideas. Don’t write email addresses in a none-email format. If you must do something, make the email address an image and encrypt the mailto: link. (And beef up your server side spam protection and the filters in your email client).

Have a form for casual enquiries (e.g. with name, email and message fields) and a more detailed form for more serious users (maybe linked from a product detail page) – call it an order form. Protect these forms from spam bots with server side scripting, or dummy form fields.

And finally, how about providing a single field form where users can type in their email or phone number, and send it to you so you can contact them.

Spam Update

ukmagician — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:35:50 +0000

The anti form spam measure I outlined in my previous post seems to have worked.

After a day or so I was down from 10+ spam emails a day to only one or two.

Strangely, they were of a similar format (similar gobbldy gook in the submitted fields) to the ones that used to clog up my inbox. Which suggests they were automated?

Anyway, happily they now seem to have tailed off completely.

So all is well until a more advanced spam bot comes along and can beat this anti spam method.

However, there is scope to change the method I described because there is always more than one way to achieve the same result using CSS, for example different methods to hide the fake fields.

who needs for an online web forms builder ?

form1 — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 05:42:34 +0000

online web forms builder is a tool that generates online web forms.
if you are a blogger or a web site owner you must be needing for at least 1 web form.
the issue with web forms that they are hard to build, you will need a programming knowledge, databases or an expensive programmer.
FormLogix form builder is a WYSIWYG web database tool, simply drag and drop fields and you will get a fully functional system.

using FormLogix online forms builder you will be able to create your wildest forms without any coding skills,

learn more:
form builder
online web forms

Combating Spam Without Captchas and PHP

ukmagician — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:31:50 +0000

The contact form on my main site, www.dangifford.com was recently discovered by spam bots.

Instead of enquiries from people wanting me to perform magic, I have been bombarded with links to sites selling ringtones, watches and various pills and potions. So it was time to sort it out and put in some preventative measures.

Spam proofing a form is pretty straightforward in PHP. There are many free PHP contact form scripts that will add captchas and other anti-spam measures to your forms. Unfortunately, my site is static HTML on a basic hosting package with no PHP. It uses the venerable FormMail CGI script from Matt’s Script Archive to process forms.

I considered trying to add a captcha, a simple arithmetic or spelling question to ensure a human is using the form, and modifying the script to check the answer. However, my programming skills aren’t up to it (I’m just a messy hacker) and besides, I want to prevent spam, not make using my forms harder for genuine users.

So I’ve used a much simpler solution involving fake form fields. (See this article)

Add a fake textarea field to the form, giving it an easily identifiable name such as ‘comments’ or ‘message’. Rename the genuine field. For example change ‘comments’ to ‘whattheysay’.

In the stylesheet for the page, create a class including the rule ‘display: none;’ and apply it to the fake field.

Normal users will not be able to see, and therefore not be able to enter text into the fake field. But the spam bots will find it in the code and fill it with links to dodgy sites.

So, when the form is processed by the FormMail CGI script, it only needs to test for content in the fake field to determine if the message is spam.

Open up FormMail.cgi in a text editor and find the send_mail function. Enclose it in an if statement that checks whether the ‘comments’ fake field is empty. Here is the relevant code:

sub send_mail {

# Only send email if spam trapping field is empty #
if ($Form{'comments'} eq '') {

# ....rest of send_mail function.... #

# closing bracket for spam if statement #
}

}

That’s it!

In the spam emails I received, it was the textarea fields (named ‘comments’) that spammed, so that is the field I’ve faked. Other forms may have different fields that get filled with spam, but I suspect spam bots target textarea fields where they can add the most text.

Problems/ room for improvement?

I suppose spam bots might learn to detect fields hidden using this CSS technique, however there are other CSS tricks that can be used to hide the fake fields.

You could also do something other than just not sending the email. Maybe bounce it back to the spammer? I’m just happy not wasting my bandwidth downloading it.

People using alternative stylesheets (for accessibility reasons) will be able to see the fake field. For those users, add a note next to the field saying something like ‘This field is used to detect spammers – don’t write anything in it!’. Give it the same display none class as the fake field and it will disappear when viewed using the standard stylesheet.

No more spam so far…..

Using Jump Menus

ukmagician — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:41:21 +0000

Jump menus are a compact way of providing a list of links to the user. You are presented with a dropdown list where the items listed behave as links, you click on them and off you go to a new page.

These lists are often presented as ‘Quick Links’ to highlight important pages in a site or as ‘Site Navigation’ but you could present them in many other ways. On Gifford Plumbing Services (my brother’s site) I’ve used them to highlight the areas he covers.

The jump menu uses a HTML select form with a small bit of javascript. Here is the HTML code:

<form name="JumpMenuForm"> <select name="JumpMenu" onchange="MM_jumpMenu('parent',this,0);MM_jumpMenu('parent',this,0)"> <option selected="selected">Select Link...</option> <option value="Link1">Link 1</option> <option value="Link2.htm">Link 2</option> <option value="Link3.htm">Link 3</option> <option value="Link4.htm">Link 4</option> <option value="Link5.htm">Link 5</option> </select> </form>

And the javascript:
function MM_jumpMenu(targ,selObj,restore){ //v3.0 eval(targ+".location='"+selObj.options[selObj.selectedIndex].value+"'"); if (restore) selObj.selectedIndex=0; }

If you use Dreamweaver, you can easily add the above code by going to Insert > Form > Jump menu. This allows you to add the list items and links and then inserts the HTML code for the form).

Then go to the Behaviours panel and you should see ‘Jump Menu’ listed. Select this, then click on the ‘Add behaviour’ button and select ‘Jump Menu’ from the list. This adds the javascript to the head of your document.

One problem is that I don’t think Jump Menus are search engine friendly – search engines such as Google can’t follow the links. This is not a problem as long as you link to the pages elsewhere in your site, i.e. your site map.

create functional forms

form1 — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 06:09:14 +0000

formlogix is a web platform that gives a non technical users to create functional forms.

formlogix solution is simple to use and highly flexible.

the tool is based on a powerfull WYSWYG form designer and its free of charge.

if you wish to learn more :create functional forms

e-mail forms designer

form1 — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 04:57:52 +0000

if you are looking for a “heavy weight” yet easy to use form design that will

create email forms(e-mail forms designer) then we can offer you a great tool,

formlogix is a WYSWYG form designer, its requires no special skills and no coding skills, the designer is based on drag and drop and mouse clicks.

the web form designer is highly flexible and FREE.

lean more about e-mail forms designer

free web form creator

form1 — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 20:09:28 +0000

FormLogix is a free web form creator, using our tool you will be able to create amazing web forms

without wrting html,css,server side scripting and so on…absolutly 0 lines of code or skills are needed.

formlogix is a unique form creator tool, anyone can use it and it is only based on drag and drop skills.

our form creator tool is based on a flexible WYSWYG designer and you will be amaze what kind of free web forms you will be able to create.

learn more about free web form creator

web form database

form1 — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 20:04:33 +0000

formlogix is web form database tool.

using our tool anyone can build web databases and forms that binds to database.

using formlogix the database layer is being generated automatically and its requires no coding skills, no database design skills and its a simple task of drag and drop.

formlogix tool is highly sophisticated and easy to use.

learn more about web form database

html form to email

form1 — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:59:24 +0000

Formlogix is a web tool that create email forms,

using the formlogix tool any one can build html form to email without writing a single line of code.

formlogix form creator tool is highly flexible and is easy to use.

learn more about :html form to email

sending mail from web form

form1 — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 18:24:08 +0000

sending an email from html web form can be done using several methods

1-mailto tag, this option requires no special knoeldge with server side scripting.

the only issue with this method is that its requires an email client such as “outlook” to be installed at the user.

2-server side scripting:this requires some knoledge with server scripting, email component.

using formlogix email forms builder, you will find out that sending email using forms requires none of the above methods.

learn more about sending email from form

mail form builder

form1 — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 12:06:31 +0000

mail form builder is a tool that build web forms that can be submitted and to be sent via mail.

once a form is filled in, the server collects the data and then compose it into a mail,

the person who build the email form will get it via mail.

form logix is a free email form builder, formlogix web tool is flexible and easy to use.

what is a form builder ?

mail form builder