dreamweaver+forms+email submit drives me CRAZY

Evil Gummy

Ok. So!

I'm trying to create a form in dreamweaver that can be filled out, and when you click submit, it sends the filled form out to my email.

I can't seem to get the email part to work. I'm so confused by it all.

I get asked to choose my email when I run the site and hit submit...that's not what I want.

I have been working all day at finding a solution and my brain is melting.

I read stuff about email servers, web servers, etc... I'm lost. What do I need to do to make this work? Do I need a different email than aim, is there something else I'm missing?

Thanks in advance doods.

Rye

well, a mailto call will prompt a user to use their email client.

You don't want that.

What you want to do is either

A) Learn PHP to compose and send the email, and Javascript to verify it.

Use a free email form builder and embed it into your site. This is the simplest. I've used wufoo.com (Free, can be embedded, but has limits of entries per month [100] )

If you have trouble, just post here and I could help you embed it in your site.

Thrack

I built a page that does exactly what you're looking for using ASP. Of course your web server has to support ASP for it to work. Below is the basic code for sending a message.

<%
Set myMail=CreateObject("CDO.Message")
myMail.Subject="Sending email with CDO"
myMail.From="mymail@mydomain.com"
myMail.To="someone@somedomain.com"
myMail.TextBody="This is a message."
myMail.Send
set myMail=nothing
%>

Tejs

Rye has pretty much a good summary of the issue and your potential fixes. You need some server side technology to send emails. Your choice is in how you interact with that, by either making your own server that sends down a form that will post back to that server the email data, or embedding someone else's HTML page that has server side resources behind it in an iframe, or linking to that other someone's email form.

PirateJon

What server are you using? does it support SMTP?

Evil Gummy

Um, how do I know what kind of server it is? Hehe.

Sharp101

Evil Gummy wrote: »

Um, how do I know what kind of server it is? Hehe.

The first thing you need to know is if you have a php or asp server.

You can email your web hosting admin to find out.

From there, anyone here can show you the code to do it

ransim

>_> or everyone could be completely overthinking the problem.

You know, back in the day, before most of us had access to robust server environments we did actually use forms to send mail.

The easiest, though not the prettiest method is just putting your email address in the action like:

<form action="mailto:my@email.com" method="post">

The best thing would be to see if your host already has a form mail perl script set up, it'll be located in the cgi bin. Its a basic perl script for mailing forms, if you see it there then you're basically done. You set that file as your action in the form tag. Depending on how its set up your may need to provide your email in a hidden field, but it may be automatically configured.

Anything really complex form wise and you'll want to look into a server side language. But for a basic contact form it is probably overkill if you don't have experience with it.

Tejs

I think the point though was that the OP didn't want to use whatever his configured email client was on his machine to send the email though.

Evil Gummy

Yeah, I'm unsure on a few things because my friend is the one who provided me with a server to use, and I dunno how to access any host info. That's alright, I'll end up getting my own host/server soon enough.


For now, I guess I'll use Wufoo, it's decent enough for me to run some tests on the site to see if I even want the forms on there or not.


What I'm gleaning, is that I need a server that supports php... and access to my cgi folder? I don't know where that is, exactly, I'm assuming on the host somewhere? OH these websites and codes and such!!

Thrack

There's an easy way to tell is the server is running ASP. Create a new file in dreamweaver, name it whatever.asp and put this in the body of the page:

<%
response.write("Hello World!")
%>

and then put the page on the server. When you view the page in your browser if it's blank you're not running ASP. If it says 'Hello World!' you're set.

Evil Gummy

What if it shows the code like you posted it?

Thrack

Right, that means that you don't have ASP. I didn't really think that through.
At least now you know.

Sharp101

Ok, now do the same thing but with

<?php echo "Hello World!"; ?>

and name the file whatever.php

ransim

The cgi-bin would just be a folder you can see in the list of folders when you connect to the server via ftp.

If its a friend providing hosting though, you may not be set up with anything at all.

If you want to test and see if you have php create a new page, call it phpinfo.php then past in this:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

If you see a page with a bunch of information on php when you load it in a browser then the server is running php.

Tutto

Here is an example of simple form from php form tutorial:
[HTML]<form>
<table>
<tr>
<td>Name *</td>
<td><input type="text"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Email *</td>
<td><input type="text"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Phone</td>
<td><input type="text"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Field_check</td>
<td>
<input type="checkbox" value="1"><label>Check_1</label><br>
<input type="checkbox" value="2"><label>Check_2</label><br>
<input type="checkbox" value="3"><label>Check_3</label>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Message *</td>
<td><textarea rows="5"></textarea></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input type="button" id="subbut" value="Submit"></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>[/HTML]