advanced forms/contact

**AmaDee** · 03-14-2007, 02:35 AM

Re: advanced forms/contact

Here's the tutorial. Watch out, it's a long one, but make sure you follow the instructions to the T.

Advanced Blue Voda Form Processor

Advanced Blue Voda Form Processor (ABVFP) is a server side generic form processor written in php. It was first made as an attempt to solve VodaHost users form problems, by providing generic form processing, with field validation, multiple file uploads, multiple choice dropdown boxes processing, spam submission checking, and autoresponder embedded in the script.

The script has met a great success and is actually in use in many sites. Minor updates have been done, during the 4 months of its life. However, a need for a dramatic improvement has become obvious. The main points that needed updating were:

1. Installation process: it required a certain effort by the user. And, it was done through publishing BlueVoda pages (.bvp) and uploading php files.
2. No file attachments to the mail: the files were uploaded, but they were not attached to the mail.
3. No database support. The script could not store the info in a database.
4. No Save of the project: if you wanted to modify the project, you had to retype all the settings from scratch.
5. Just one form per page could be processed: that was because ABVFP used the page name (as well as the hidden field value) to determine which set from the saved settings it should use.

Well, the new version, ABVFP v2.0 is here!

Here are the main changes:

1. The script will now save the settings in a database. To determine which form it must process, there is still a hidden field, which now represents the form identity. It is called “Formid” and it’s value is a simple number, like 1, 2, 3 ,,, etc. Consequently, you can have multiple forms in your pages, each one with it’s own ID number. Further more, you can now recall the form settings at any moment, and modify them. Also, you can configure a new form either from scratch, or use an existing form settings and modify only what is needed, just like you are using the templates in BlueVoda.
2. The installation procedure is fully automated. You simply upload the files in your site, and run the installation file. ABVFP now has an integrated error report that will guide you if errors are found in the user input.
3. The script now supports database storing of the info. Not only, but it will also AUTOCREATE the necessary database table, although we do recommend manual creation of the table (see instructions).
4. The script will now ATTACH uploaded files in your email. No need anymore to download the files or open them in your browser, they arrive in your inbox.
5. The script will now support multiple email addresses for the script owner. The first one of them, will be used as the reply address for the autoresponder email.
6. You can now specify if your email address will be included or not as reply address in the autoresponder email.
7. Minor formatting issues have been fixed. You can now have symbols like $, ‘ , ; , £ , & etc without the annoying addition of the slashes “\” that php automatically added. Line returns are also allowed now, so you can format your headers and footers adding blank lines.
8. A more helpful help system has been integrated in the product.

Please read carefully the instructions as well as the End User License Agreement before installing this product.

Installation instructions.

1. Please download the ABVFPv2.0 zip from our site, clicking on this Download link.
2. Create a folder, preferably inside your BlueVoda folder, but it can be anywhere in your computer.
3. Extract all the files inside the same folder.
4. Connect to your site, using either FTP or File Manager.
5. Create a folder inside your public_html folder. Name it ABVFP.
6. Upload all the extracted files (gif and jpg files included) in this ABVFP folder. Do NOT upload the
.bvp files, they are only useful for opening them in your BV.
Make sure that all files have permissions 644.
Sometimes, FTP or file manager fail to attribute the correct permissions.
7. Create a database in your Control Panel. Name it “ABVFP”.. Create a user (or add on of the existing
users) and add this user in the “ABVFP” database.
8. Now, type in your browser address bar:
http://www.yourdomain.com/ABVFP/dbts_install.php

This will take you to the installation wizard, and you will have the following screen:

Fill in the details. Username and password are the ones that you will use for accessing your administrator are in the future. Must be letters and / or numbers, from 8 to 16 characters.

Database Host: Usually localhost
Database Name: Usually, ControlPanelusername_DBname where DBname is the one that
you have provided during the database creation.
Database User: Usually, ControlPanelusername_username where username is the one that
you have provided during the user creation / adding in the database section.
Database Password: The one that you have set for your database user.

Please read the EULA agreement and check the relevant checkbox, otherwise the script will not allow you to go on.

That’s all. Installation will be automatically completed. If you have mistakes in your input, the script will report them and prompt you to edit your details and retry. At installation completed, the following screen will appear:

Installation is completed. Click on “ABVFP Control Panel” to enter your administration area.

When all the procedure id finished, please connect to your site with FTP or File Manager, and change permissions to the file” dbts_ install.php” to be “000” . This way you will avoid hackers trying to mess with your ABVFP installation wizard.

Important security note:

Click on the button “ABVFP Control Panel”. If the next screen comes up, as it should, please take a minute and change back your “ABVFP” permissions to be “755”. Then, enter the folder itself, and change permissions to the files “dbts_install.php” and “dbts_ABVFP_install1.php” to be 000

This way, no one will be able, even if he knows of the presence of these files in your site, to connect with his browser and mess up with your ABVFP.

How to use ABVFP.

I f you have clicked on the above ABVFP Control panel, the screen that follows will appear. If instead you want to enter your Administration Area later, you need to type in your browser, the following address: http://www.yourdomain.com/ABVFP/. If you bookmark this address, you will always have available in your favorites.

Ok, this is what you will see:

Please use the username and the password you have created during the ABVFP installation.

As soon as you do so, the following screen will appear:

Your options are:
1. Create a new form from scratch.
2. Configure a new form, starting from the settings of an existing form (use it as template)
3. Modify the settings of an already existing form.
Ok, let’s start using option 1. We will setup a new form, starting from scratch. If you simply click on “Step 2” this is the default action that the script will perform.

So, this is what you will have on your screen:

Please note that you can click on the iconbeside the fields, to have a help window opened with the necessary instructions.

Ok, let’s take things one at a time.

At the top, you can see the number of the form that you are configuring. You will notice that it is set to 2 (for the moment). This is because during installation, ABVFP creates the settings of an example form, to help you see what you need to type in the fields.

Next, you see

1. Your domain name: type the full domain name.
2. Your form URL: type in the FULL form URL. It is necessary for bot spam protection
3. Form name: it will remind you later which form that is, if you need to edit its settings.
4. Upload folder: type in folder where the uploaded files will be placed. It will be auto created the first time a file is uploaded. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you install ABVFP in a folder of its own, as we advised you, the upload folder will be: http://www.yoursite.com/ABVFP/uploads . You don’t have to name this folder “uploads”, you can name it anything.
5. The rest of the fields are quite explanatory by themselves. Please only note that you need to create and publish a “thankyou” and an “errorpage”. The names of these pages are not important, nor are the folder where they are; just make sure to type in the full URL of these pages.
6. Please read VERY carefully the “Storing the info in the Database” part, which regards the database storing.
7. Click on Memorize settings. This will store the settings of this form in the database, and will also allow you to edit the settings in the future, if required. The following screen will appear:

As you see, the script will report the operation results, and will also provide you with the Form ID number.
You will use this Form ID number as it will be explained in the “Setting up your form correctly” section.

You can now close this window, or go on and process another form. For security reasons, you will have to loggin again.

Storing the info in the database.

As you have seen, ABVFP has an option for storing the info in a database table. There are two ways to do this:

A. The automatic way.

If you tick the box “Create Automatically Database Table”, then, in occasion of the very first submission from the relevant form, ABVFP will auto create a table in the database, and will store the info submitted in it.
There are however, certain conditions and limitations. Let’s see what these are:

ABVFP cannot know how long your fields are. To let the script know, you need to set, for ALL your form fields, the necessary length extension (-A or –B etc). Look to the “Setting up your form correctly” section to see what this means. The script will create for each form field, a database field of equal length.

ABVFP will receive the info from the form, will analyze this info, then it will create the database table, if it doesn’t already exist, and will store the info. However, when you send the info from the form to ABVFP, NOT IN ALL CASES all the fields are sent. This is the case of checkboxes: if a checkbox hasn’t been ticked, NO INFO will be sent to ABVFP. So, it becomes mandatory, that when you set up your form and make the first trial submission, ALL fields are filled in, and radio buttons and checkboxes checked. If this is NOT done the first time, there will be no other chance. You will need to enter your account Control Panel, enter in the MySQL section, and, using phpMyAdmin, delete the table. Then you can resubmit, with all fields filled in, and ABVFP will create the table again, this time with the correct number of fields.

Please note that the table that ABVFP will create is called “Form_x” where x is the Form ID number.

B. The manual way

You can manually create your tables, using phpMyAdmin as said above. This will also allow you to define field type, field length, keys, collation, etc. This is an option only for advanced users. Please note that ABVFP will try to store in the database, two more pieces of information: the date, in “January/24/2007” format, and the IP address of the visitor. In order to do this, you need to create two fields (preferably the last two in the table): “Submission_Date“ and “IP_Address”.
This way, you can add even other fields in your table for use by the administrator.
However, we only advise such table creation to advanced users, with experience in Database management systems as phpMyAdmin.

Setting up your form correctly.

Ok, let’s start with an example form that we have built. In order to show you the script capabilities, we have included text fields, a textarea, radio buttons, check buttons, a listbox set at single selection, a second one set to allow multiple selections, and 1 upload field. The steps to follow are, however, the same, for whatever form you want to process.

You can open the form (contactform.bvp) from the zip content, (Non BV users: open the “contactform.html” file) so you can examine it closely. Please note that there are no images, otherwise the page that you would download would be half complete.

Please take note of the requirements your form must fulfil for the proper script functioning:

1. ALL of your fields must be named correctly. This means that each field must have a unique name.
Since the field names will be used for creating the email that will be sent to you, it is reasonable to
give the fields names like ”Name”, “Address”, “City”, etc. Avoid blank spaces, and symbols as “?”,
“/”,” \”, “.”, “-“, “@”. Using these symbols might crash the script in some cases.
2. If necessary, use underscores between words, f.e. “First_Name”.
3. The visitor’s email field, MUST be named “Email”, uppercase “E”, lowercase for the rest of
the word.
4. The submit button, MUST be named “submit”, all lowercase characters.
5. The reset button MUST be named “reset”, all lowercase characters.
6. Multiple choice Listboxes or Comboboxes must have SQUARE BRACKETS [ ] , (-with no
space between them –) after their name, so that HTML will interpret them as arrays. For
example, a “How did you find us” listbox allowing multiple selections, should be named
“How did you find us[]” .
7. The info sent out doesn’t include any validation information about the field themselves. So,
we need to include this info somehow: we will do this by adding an extension to the field
names, that will “instruct” our script what (if any) kind of validation it must perform. These
extensions are the following:

So, f.e., if you have a field named “Name”, and you want to make it a required field, you should name it “Name-R” . If you want to set the length of the same field to 30 characters, you should name it “Name-RA”.
A telephone field should be a numeric field, so it should be named “Telephone-N” . If you need it to be a required field, just name it “Telephone-NR”. A comments area, that you wish to be up to 200 characters and contain the @ symbol only once (to avoid spammers using your script for sending spam emails) should be named “Comments-H”. A required multiple choice drop down should be f.e. “ Selection-RB[] “. The order used for validation and required extensions is not important: -RA is the same as -AR.
Please note that the script itself will take off these validation characters in the email that will be sent to you.

Please remember to set your form properties as follows:

Action: http://www.yoursite.com/ABVFP/dbts_abvfp.php
Method: POST
Encoding Type: multipart / formdata

As you see, the action requires the FULL path to your ABVFP to be typed in. This is true if you have installed ABVFP in a folder of it’s own, as advised.

One last but most important step: You need to add a hidden field in your form. This hidden field must be named “Formid” and its value must be the form number that ABVFP has indicated to you when you set up the form.

At this point, if you have installed the software, and published your form, you can test submit to see your form working. A “thankyou” and an “error” page are already included in the zip, so they are already available for the script to work. However, the next paragraphs contain the instructions on creating your own pages.

Please remember, that if you have opted to have the info stored in a database, your VERY FIRST SUBMISSION should have all radio and checkboxes fields checked.

2. Setting up a “Thank you “ page.

This is the page where your visitor will be redirected after a successful submission. This is a simple HTML page that you can create in BlueVoda (or in other software). Have a look at this simple example or, if you are offline, open the “thankyou_page.html” from the zip content. We suggest that you include your menubar in this page, so visitors will be able to continue surfing your site.

There are absolutely no special requirements regarding this page. It is a simple HTML page, as any other page of your site. Build it any way you like. There is also no problem in saving your page as anything else: You can save it as “myerrorpage”, or “contactformerrorpage” or anything else. Using the script administrator, as shown in the following part of this tutorial, will allow you to setup the script correctly for the new page names.

3. Setting up the “errorpage”

We recommend that at a first time you do not create your own error page. Just use the one that came with the zip, already in html format.. Later on, when you have become familiar with this software, you can modify the page or even create your own. If you go this way, skip this step for the moment.

The error page is the page that will contain all the error messages that may be created through the script validation process. It has to be a php file, so let’s see how you can create it:

Create the page as you like it: there is only one layout requirement: leave enough space for a textarea window that will display the error messages. Have a look at this one, or open the file “errorpage.bvp” from the zip.

NON BlueVoda users : open the “errorpage.php” file.

Now, this page has to be published as PHP file, not HTML. This is because this page has to communicate with the script, in order to be able to receive the error message from the script, and display it properly.
Let’s see how this is done:

Double click the text area and set the initial value to be : <?php echo $error; ?> . You can copy it form here and paste it in the “Initial Value” window.

Now go in Page Properties, and set the page extension (when the page is published) to be php as in the picture below:

(NON BlueVoda users: publish the page as PHP if your software allow you to do so, or publish it as HTML and then rename it directly on the server, changing the extension from .html to .php). Please note that the code can also be edited simply in notepad.

As you can see in the image, you also need to embed a “Back to the form” button so the visitor can return to the form and edit his errors. To accomplish this, use BlueVoda’s Advanced Button tool.

Click on the tool, and the button will appear in your page.
Right click it and select Properties from the right click menu.

Now, when you click on Properties, the Advanced Button Properties dialog box will appear:

Set the properties as follows:

Name (optional) : Back
Value (optional) : Back
Button Type (required) : OnClick
OnClick Action (required) : Go to the previews page.

Now select the button text and edit it so the button label becomes “Back to the form”.

You can even customize your button appearance by clicking on Style.
Of course, you can always use the page that came with the zip, and only customize the layout and the visual part of the page.

NON BlueVoda users: If your software does not allow you to insert a “Back” button, instead of creating the page from scratch, use the HTML page as it is. The Back button is already there. Customize only the layout and the visual part of the page.

One last step before you can publish your Errorpage: Go in Page HTML, click on “Start of Page” and paste the following code (you can copy it directly from here):

<?php
session_start();
$error = $_SESSION[error];
?>

NON BlueVoda users: Insert the code in the very beginning of your page code, before anything else.

Ok, now save your page as “errorpage”. Save and Publish.

There is no problem in saving your page as anything else: You can save it as “myerrorpage”, or “contactformerrorpage” or anything else. Using the script administrator, as shown in the following part of this tutorial, will allow you to setup the script correctly for the new page name.

End User License Agreement

Advanced Blue Voda Form Processor (ABVFP) is a generic server side Form processor created by DBTechnosystems.com. It is intended for processing form data submitted through a Web Form. It is distributed free of charge, but a small agreed upon fee will be charged if and only if an Installation is requested by the user by directly requiring this through our relevant Installation Request Form, our Contact Form, or other mean of communication.

You may use ABVFP on your site(s), as end user, but you are NOT allowed to redistribute or deposit for download the files related to the product, in any way. For distribution purposes please redirect the interested user to the Download Location on our site. You may wish to review the Technical Features before you go on.

You may modify the files of this product to your own risk. ABVFP has been thoroughly tested, however, it is distributed "as it is", so absolutely no guarantee is offered. Depending on the user settings, and since ABVFP allows for file uploads, potentially malicious code could be uploaded on your site. Please make sure to follow the relevant instructions on security issues, in the Instructions File.

By installing this software, you accept that the Authors cannot be held liable for any reason and for any type of real or potential damage. If you disagree with the above, do not install this software.

Support by email is provided for free to VodaHost.com clients. For support beyond email, a charge might be asked for. Support to non VodaHost clients will be charged on an agreed upon basis. This EULA is integrant part of the installation package and ABVFP itself, and as such no "File not found in the package" excuses will be accepted.

**Vasili** · 03-14-2007, 03:13 AM

Re: advanced forms/contact

Good help, AmaDee, but Deserie might find it a lot easier to merely post her situation in the Forum that deals with this (rather than the Website Showcase Forum), and get a personalized response from General Naval himself, rather than feel as if more head pounding need be performed to get things right!
LOL

This is the Thread, and this is General Naval's Email.

**AmaDee** · 03-14-2007, 01:31 PM

Re: advanced forms/contact

u know, i didn't catch that. i just read that she needed help and tried to do just that.