Order form ~ PHP ??

BigPoppaFluff · 27-07-2009 10:10PM #1

Hello People

I need help..
I am doing a web design course with my final assessment due in Friday
To finish off my site I need an order form and a comment page, Alas the course instructor is not versed in PHP so is unable to assist me here... (Do I even need PHP?)

Does anyone know of a site that I can build what I need, even a site with a template....

All help/assistance is greatly appreciated...

Thanks

Poppa

oeb · 28-07-2009 09:28AM

It's pretty simple.

Your input elements on a form are normally along the lines of : <input name="firstname" type="text" value="" />

It's the 'name' attribute that's important here. When you submit a form to a php script (The target of the script is defined in the form opening tag <form method="post" action="path/to/my/script.php">). Now, a php page recieves a post request, it keeps all the request details in what is known as a superglobal. Superglobals are constructs created by php where you can retrieve information such as get or post variables, server information etc. Post variables are accessed like this

$_POST;

Where variable_name is the same as the 'name' attribute from the previous page.

Now, mail is also easy to manage with php. It's simply :

mail("email address", "subject", "message");
(There is also a fourth argument, for additional headers, but you don't need this for now.)

So now, onto a very basic contact form, which when submitted, will email the results to you.

Your contact form, contact.html
[html]
<html>
<head><title>Contact Us</title></head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="domail.php">
<label for="name">Your Name :</label> <input type="text" name="name" value="" /><br />
<label for="email">Your Email :</label> <input type="text" name="email" value="" /><br />
<label for="comments">Comments :</label> <textarea name="comments"></textarea><br />
<input type="submit" value="Submit Form" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
[/html]And now the php script, domail.php
[php]
<?php
// Anything with 2 slashes before it like this, is a comment and ignored by the interpretor.

//First we take the input. We should sanatize it to make sure someone has not submitted malicious code, but this is beyond the scope of this
$name = $_POST;
$email = $_POST;
$comments = $_POST;

// Now we need to build up the body of the email.
// We will do this with what is called heredoc http://ie.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php#language.types.string.syntax.heredoc

$email_body = <<<EOB
You have recieved a new email from your website!
Name : $name
Email : $email
Comments : $comments
EOB;

// Now we will define the subject and to address for the email
$toadd = "my@email.com";
$subject = "New contact form enquiry!";

// And now we send the email
mail($toadd, $subject, $email_body);
?>
[/php]Now, keep in mind that I am delibratly leaving out things here, such as error checking, data sanatization etc. But if you want to know more about them, there are a million and one introductory php tutorials available online.

You will also probably want to do a "Thank you for your enquiry, we will get back to you, blah blah!" page. You can just stick the html in after the closing php (?>) tag on domail.php.