- After deciding what needs to go into your form,
make a layout sketch. Then create it in Dreamweaver.
Create a table to contain your page. Explanatory
information can go above the form, or inside it. Save the page (save
early, save often).
Insertà form. This creates the form tags that
enclose the form items.
Then, clicking inside the red dotted box that appears,
create another table inside the form to align the form elements. You’ll
determine the number of rows and columns by the layout sketch you’ve
made.
Insertà form object to create the various form
elements. A distinct Properties window will appear for each object.
Each form object must be named. Give them names that make sense —
no spaces, no symbols.
Text box — for the user to input text. May
be one line or multi-line.
Button — the buttons at the end of a form are
made with this — you can only select submit, reset, or none for
the action, and the text that appears in the button.
Check box — this allows multiple selections.
It may be checked or unchecked when the form appears. The checked value
must be entered.
Radio button — this is an either/or button,
only one of the array may be checked. Each button in a group must have
the same name, and the value selected is what is returned.
List/Menu — this is how you create pop-up menus
or lists. A pop-up typically only allows one selection, a list may allow
multiple.
Don’t worry about the other field types for
now.
Now create a "thank you" page that will
be returned when someone submits the form. Then create a hidden field
somewhere between the form tags that points to it.
<INPUT type="hidden" name="nexturl" value="http://www.teamweb.com/thanks.html">
- When everything is to your liking, save the form
page again. Now open BBEdit or another text editor to create the template
to format the form output. You can’t do this part in DW because
it inserts code that will make the template unusable. Open the example
mailmerge template. Save as formname.dot, where formname is the filename
you have given the form. The file may be saved loose in the directory
with the other files, or in a separate directory. I call mine "cgi."
- Go through the template, putting your information
in place of what’s in the template example. The email that is generated
by the form is based on what you enter in this template.
The general pattern for the template is
Item: @fieldcontent@
where "item" is the text that will appear
in the email, followed by the result of the contents of each field.
I.e., Name: @name@ will come out as Name: John Doe
- Keep going until all your form fields have corresponding
items in the template.
- Now use Fetch or another ftp program to put the
files on the server. Again, you can’t use Dreamweaver because it
adds code that breaks the template. once the files are on the server,
you have to set "permissions." This allows the user to "execute"
the template. Set permissions like this
owner group everyone
read x x x
write x
execute x x
- You can also use the "save to ftp" function
in BBEdit, but only after you have set permissions in ftp. You can’t
do that in BBEdit, but once they’re set, they stay set even though
you re-save the file.
- Test the form by filling it out online. The email
should be set to you until everything is working fine, and you may want
to include your email for a while even after you set it to your client.
It almost never works perfectly after the first try!
- If you want required fields in your form, you will
need to use a slightly different template. See me.