This is by far the most common dilemma that do-it-yourself web masters come to us about.
The History
Back in the early 2000’s, we catered a lot to Microsoft FrontPage users — one of the nice things with MS FP was that it had a form handler built in to the server side, if you were to publish your site with FrontPage Extensions.
Of course, FrontPage and FrontPage Extensions are not much more than a fading memory. Dreamweaver is king when it comes to web development these days, but there is no native form handling function built in to Dreamweaver.
For some time, in one form or anther, we have provided in our web templates some facility to process form data. So that, when someone hits “submit” on your form, something, somehow, bundles up that data, and sends you an email.
Recently, we developed a simple but handy little script that you can use, free of charge, to handle your form submissions.
The Problem
Primarily, most do-it-yourself web developers are not familiar with server side scripting languages. How do the form fields get from the web page, to your email box? It isn’t all that complicated, when boiled down to a few lines of PHP code, but suffice to say, if you get one thing wrong, it isn’t going to work.
Download Version 1.6The Solution
We put together a little script that simplifies the configurations. There is even a facility for using the Google reCAPTCHA facility, for blocking spammers.
We include this in our web template download packages. We’re offering it here for the community should you want to use it. While we are providing this form handling solution free of charge, should you want us to install, configure, or troubleshoot it for you, there may be a nominal fee for our time. You may contact us for more details.
You may download the “process_form.php” script here: download process_form.php (v1.6) (make sure you save it into the root folder of your website — aka, the place where your index.htm “home page” resides)
Basic instructions for using this file are as follows:
FYI: There are more detailed instructions within the process_form.php
file itself.
- Make sure that any form that you use, uses:
action="/process_form.php"
Example:<form method="post" action="/process_form.php">
- Make sure you publish up your “process_form.php” script, as well as any page that contains your form, up to your web server.
If you are transitioning from a “submit.server-apps.com” form, the above steps are ALL you have to do, as version 1.6 of the form handler will take the from configurations that already exist in your form, and send along the data to the right email address.
Video Instructions