Boy, some of you will probably want to punch me in the teeth for asking such a simple question... but to me it's anything but simple.

I'm finishing up the design of my freelance copywriting website, and I've come to the "Contact Me" page.

I'd like to create a simple online form that prospects of my service could fill out.

For those of you who have forms on your sites, how did you create them? Did you use a third party Web app or service... or did you do the XHTML grunt work yourself?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Nick Wright

Hi Nick,

This is a really good question.

There are any number of ways to go about this, but the most logical place to start is with your hosting company. Do they have a built-in formmail script that you can use? (If you use a cPanel host, the answer to this question is "yes.") If they have it built-in, all you have to do is create a web page with the form fields, and add the variables in your HTML coding that call the script. Your host will be able to provide you with instructions on how to use it. It's really pretty much copy/paste. If you can build a basic web page, you can do a contact form.

If your hosting company doesn't offer this, you should be able to upload and use a formmail script on your hosting account. I recommend NMS Formmail. It is free, secure, and works like a champ.

I recommend against using anything Matt has written (e.g., Matt's Formmail) for security reasons. Every version before the current has been exploited, and among security experts it's considered a only a matter of time before the current one is cracked.

Alternatively you can use a third-party formmail service. There are both free and paid, although paying for it doesn't buy you any advantage that you can't also get from a free solution. Paying for it does not buy you any extra advantages, guarantees or assurances that you can't get from free. (In some cases paying is better. This is not one of them.)

Third-party solutions make me nervous, because no matter what the site's policies profess, you simply have no guarantees that their system is secure. For all any of us know, they could have an employee who's been bought off by spammers who has quietly added a few little lines into their scripts which forward your customers' confidential information to a database of some type, or directly to spammers. Every formmail provider on the planet is going to swear up and down that this isn't the case, but the fact is that none of us run their servers, nor have direct access to their scripts, to know this for sure. Maybe if I hadn't seen worst-case scenarios in action myself in the past, I wouldn't be so paranoid about this, but it doesn't take much to get just one employee to stray and do things behind-the-scenes without anybody else knowing it.

Many hosts offer a pre-installed solution, or a click-to-install solution, all of which work great. It's also not very hard to install and configure a formmail script. Such solutions are accessible enough that IMO, I would opt for one of those in a heartbeat over using a third-party installation.

If you have any questions, please LMK!

Bailey

Hi Bailey,

Thanks for the wealth of information!

Another member of this forum sent me a PM and told me I should check out my hosting service as well... to see if there's a tool I can use on there.

I'm going to check it out some time tonight. I use BlueHost.com for my site, and they have a ton of tools already in place for other site features, so I imagine they'll have a tool for me to build a simple form.

I just didn't think to look there... go figure.

Thanks again Bailey!

Nick

Bailey,

I just made a form with phpform generator. Here' s the problem. When I test it, I get this error, on submit:

That problem resolved... but now a new one. The form goes through, but I get an "invalid email" error message. I can't tell what this refers to. Invalid email I put in the email block on the form? Or invalid email I have the form data being mailed to? I can't figure it out.

What am I doing wrong? Please help, Bailey!!!

Howdy guys

Glad to be of whatever help I can be?

I don't use phpformgenerator myself, so I'm not entirely sure, but one thing to check is to make sure that the e-mail address you put in (the one that delivers the results to you) is an address on your domain. Your hosting company might (and should) have the script restricted so it can only send mail on-server. This is a security measure which would prevent the script from being used to send out millions of spams off-server. So, maybe try that -- make sure the e-mail it is sending results to, is an address on your domain name.

Bailey

Bailey,

Thanks for the response. Yeah, I've been using my domain email... still nothing. I might have to find another script and figure out how to set it up.

Vin

Is this the phpform generator script in Fantastico? If so, that thing is awfully complex to set up. I took a look at it one afternoon and decided since I didn't have the whole day/evening to dedicate to ferreting out the exact configuration, I'd use something else.

If you're on a cPanel host, you should have two easy-to-use options at your disposal, in cPanel under "Add-on Scripts"

(1) Formmail Clone, works very much like Matt's Formmail. Same variables, etc. It's a very basic script but it works just fine. There should be instructions provided in your cPanel of how to configure it. If not, let me know, and I'll post some instructions here.

(2) cgiemail, which will install into your cgi-bin. I believe it can create HTML form results. The instructions for how to use it are here.

Bailey

Thanks Bailey... I was going to use the clone, but I couldn't find any instructions. I'll have to look again.

Hey Nick,

As far as form processing scripts go, I've been using Kmita Mail for a few years to process contact forms for myself and some clients with great results. While I'm using an older version I think I paid $20 for, their new script costs $25 and has more features than most people will ever use.

Of course, processing the form data is one thing, you'll also need an html form to pass that info along to the script for processing!

I've been using Dreamweaver for years and so find it easy to use for creating my forms, but if you're new to them the following article might be helpful So, You Want A Form, Huh?

Or, If you want, let me know which fields you want to have on your form and I'll write something up for you quick.

Howdy Nick,

I use NMS, the same script Bailey suggested. It works very well, is near 'harvest' proof (meaning it never discloses your email address to spam harvesters) and it is free.

There are two downsides to using NMS:

1) Learning curve. Once you setup NMS it's easy to understand. If you are familiar with webforms you won't have a problem though.
2) spammers search for and mass submit to a bunch of online forms to get a confirmation email they can in turn spam. So if you use NMS make sure to
a) rename the script to something other than the default name spammers search for
b) use a throw away email account or disable autoresponses
c) use image visual confirmation/challenge to your forms -- but only if your target market has a high level of sophistication. Here's some info about that: Image::VisualConfirmation - Add anti-spam visual confirmation/challenge to your web forms - search.cpan.org or consider encrypting your forms so it slows spammers down during their searches.

Andre