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Maybe you want professional-looking e-mail forms which work, and are completely ad-free? This tutorial uses an excellent script which is fairly easy to install and use. However, you must have php enabled on your server (meaning that you probably need to be hosted or have a domain). All credit goes to regretless.com/scripts for this tutorial :) That site has some amazing scripts for download and they are well worth a look. 1. Download DodosMail 1.05 and unzip. 2. Upload dodosmail.php and test.html to your website. They MUST be in the same directory. 3. Open up test.html and familiarise yourself with the code. It's actually pretty simple. Look at the first line: <input type="hidden" name="required_fields" value="subject,after_url,name,email,message"> The value= bit shows all the names of the fields you want to be required. In this example, this means that the sender can't submit the form unless they fill out the 'subject', 'after_url', 'name', 'email' and 'message' fields. Don't change this until after you have created your ideal form. 4. Before you do this, there are a couple of things you need to change. On the next line down, value="you@yourdomain.com", needs to be changed to your actual email address. Find value="DodosMail" - this is what the subject of your email will be when it appears in your inbox. It's a good idea to change it to 'Contest of the Month' or 'Suggestions' or whatever you're using this particular form for. 5. After that you will see a lot of code which customises your email from on the page; you can change that at your leisure. You can also add your stylesheet or header and footer to integrate your page with the rest of your site. For now, scroll past it until you get to name="owner_name" value="me". Change 'me' to your name. Towards the end you will see name="after_url" value="thankyou.html" You either need to page a page called thankyou.html which thanks the visitor for submitting the form, or change the URL to the thankyou page you already have. 6. Ok, now save everything and test the script by going to http://your-site.com/test.html and filling out the form. You will need to check your email to make sure it's sent. If it hasn't worked, then make sure you didn't delete anything by accident and that your server supports php. 7. Now you probably want to customise the fields. This is the code for a simple one-line field (you can change the 'size' and 'field title' to anything you like): To add a textarea (you can type as much as you want): <textarea wrap="virtual" rows="5" name="problem"> </textarea> 8. Okay, now at the bottom of the test.html page, create your ideal form! To give you an example, here's part of mine. 9. Once you're happy with your code, rename the test.html page to contestform.html or whatever, and test it one more time to make sure it definitely still works. 10. If you want to add more forms, you need to upload dodosmail.php and test.html to a different directory on your site (otherwise you will overwrite your current pages) and repeat this tutorial again. Just remember to put a different subject name for the email which will be sent to you :) Back | Forward Advertised |