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Building a form on a website...help!

Posted: Wed 31 Mar, 2004 00.22
by Larry Scutta
I'm trying to build a 'gift list' type page on a site. Basically the page will have a list of wedding gifts, the guests will choose which they will buy and that gift will be removed from the page. There are 2 ways I could do this:

Firstly via a form that e-mails me and then I manually remove the item by editing the page. I've already made a basic verison of this using a mailto command. However this is a bit messy as the user needs to send it from their e-mail program. There used to be (when I last made a page like this about 8 years ago) anonomous e-mail senders which would process a form and e-mail it directly..... do these exsist any more, if so where. If not any ideas of an easy way to do this?

The other way would be to have some sort of script that edits the list. I've looked at some CGI tutorials and I get lost after a couple of paragraphs. Anyone know of anywhere that I can get some of-the-shelf code or software that I can use for this? (baring in mind that I'm not a computer genius!)

Posted: Wed 31 Mar, 2004 01.12
by James Hatts
For your first option of using a form and editing the list manually, you really need a proper formmail script rather than relying on people's email software to submit the form..

Your host quite possibly has such a script pre-installed, so it's well worth checking their support pages.

Failing that, you need to install a script like Formmail. Formmail is widely used but has (had?) some security issues so is frowned upon by some. However, it does the job and would suffice for your purposes.

There are many derivatives and variations of the above script.


If you want automatic removal of items from the list, that's obviously much more complicated and is probably best done with a database, though a flatfile version (ie a plain text file holding the list of gifts) would work too.

I did a quick search and there is a script which does what you want but it is $99

Posted: Wed 31 Mar, 2004 01.18
by James Hatts
If PHP is enabled on your webspace then this might be worth looking at, though the English translation is rather dodgy

Posted: Wed 31 Mar, 2004 11.43
by Larry Scutta
I've looked at Formmail before and the problem is that it's not really for a beginner like me.... the installation instructions start going on about Perl in the first paragraph!

I'm using the webspace from my Freeserve account, no idea if they have CGI or PHP folders or facilities

Posted: Wed 31 Mar, 2004 22.06
by Chris
Larry Scutta wrote:I've looked at Formmail before and the problem is that it's not really for a beginner like me.... the installation instructions start going on about Perl in the first paragraph!

I'm using the webspace from my Freeserve account, no idea if they have CGI or PHP folders or facilities
I don't think so but there used to be a hosted mail form script at BT Openworld. I've checked it using an old site that I built some while ago which was hosted not on BT and it seems to have disappeared.

Either they have moved it or it has gone due to the 'yahooing' of the service - ie. forcing you to upgrade to a package with stuff you can already get for free, such as geoshittes web hosting (complete with adverts) and the crappy yahoo email interface.

Posted: Wed 31 Mar, 2004 23.10
by Neil Jones
Larry Scutta wrote:I've looked at Formmail before and the problem is that it's not really for a beginner like me.... the installation instructions start going on about Perl in the first paragraph!
May I suggest http://www.response-o-matic.com then?
I'm using the webspace from my Freeserve account, no idea if they have CGI or PHP folders or facilities
There is no CGI/perl or PHP facility on Freeserve but they do give you a mailform but I believe it's only available on the original webspace offering and not the poxy "mysite" offering. Failing that, see response-o-matic :)

Posted: Thu 01 Apr, 2004 11.42
by Larry Scutta
Ahhhh.... Response-o-matic looks like just what I was after thanks.

I looked up my uni homepage from 8 years ago to see how I did it. That used an e-mail server in Finland (uta.fi) which doesn't do anonomous remailing any more