I am not a web developer but I do have a lot of programming experience in C# and Windows forms programming. On our company webpage my boss wants me to put in a textbox where visitors can submit a comment and press a submit button and that comment will be sent to an email address. Right now, our website uses just plain old html, no php or javascript or anything like that. I am wondering what is the simplest way to accomplish what I need? Can someone point me in the right direction? The website is hosted on an Apache server so I won't be able to use aspx.
The simplest method depends heavily on what is available. If PHP is supported, use it.
Here's a simple example (I wouldn't focus too much on their HTML -- which is a bit shoddy) but the PHP at the bottom to give you an idea on how to pull the <form> in and send the email.
If you don't have PHP and don't want to install it, you can do this without any server-side code and outsource the problem. Bravenet (a name that will be familiar with any old-school webdeveloper) have a free hosted form solution that lets you post your forms to their server and they email you the result.
Not amazingly professional, but takes about 10 seconds to implement.
The simplest solution would be have the form action as "mailto:email#address.com"
However, this has the downside of the email address being sent to being exposed to spam bots, along with the clients mail application having to load to send the email which can be confusing and slow.
Sending emails in PHP is common, and there are thousands of articles out there on how to do it, here's one
In this case the most simple way is to install PHP to your apache to use the mail()-function.
Of couse you could use tomcat additional to apache, but the configuaration is much more time-eating.
If you don't want to use any sort of scripting technology, then the form mailto might be your only option. You can just make the action of your HTML form mailto:youraddress and the form post will be mailed directly.
I would highly recommend looking into some sort of scripting technology though to do this in a more reliable way....PHP looks like a good fit in your environment.
Related
Absolute newb here, please forgive me for this basic question.
I have built my portfolio site using Github pages, but am experiencing spam via my contact form (hosted by GetSimpleForm). I am trying to implement Google reCAPTCHA, but I'm a bit stuck in the backend part. As I understand, Github pages don't support PHP, so I can not actually complete the form verification.
Google documentation here was unfortunately a bit overwhelming and cryptic to me as a beginner, since I just stared at my Github html/css/js files and had no clue what to put where.
Am I trying to do the impossible? Is it possible to use reCaptcha on Github pages? If so, is there a beginner friendly tutorial somewhere or a straightforward "copy-paste" thing I could use? (so far, it's not been clear where to use the secret key from the API key pair for example)
Thanks a bunch for any leads or alternative solutions for spam prevention that would work in Github pages!
The short answer is you cannot. Github Pages only support static site. You have to host your own website if you want to do some complex stuffs like backend check etc. and mostly they are not free.
The only suggestion I can come up is simply change your contact form to regular html form instead of hosting by the 3rd party website you are using. I suspect that the main reason you got spam is because you are using it's service.
A really simple way to do it is to make the form with HTML (you can either copy the code from a pre-made HTML site with a form, or find a youtube tutorial that shows you how to make a HTML form, pretty simple), and host it on something like Netlify. Netlify is free for static websites unless you are doing something really complicated, and it has a built in form submission that will send you an email automatically every time someone fills out the form. You don't need PHP or a third party app or anything.
You still create and edit the code of the website through Github, you just need to connect it to Netlify for the forms. I'm a complete beginner and I figured it out. Netfly has some tutorials that explain it nice and simple. No reason to pay or do a lot of complicated stuff, and you can make professional websites with just HTML and CSS.
I'm setting up some transactional email fun in our Codeigniter app via integrating with Sendgrid.
I've got things setup and ready to move forward with creating all of the specific transactions/emails, but I was wondering about the most efficient and/or elegant way of doing so.
It seems a bit convoluted to include the appropriate email code in each of the functions. To call a specific function from a clean and separated email controller would require me to use AJAX (so as to not cause a redirect).
Is there some way that I'm not considering currently that would help balance things, namely cleanliness and separation along with coherency and ease?
Thanks for any thoughts-
Not sure about the specifics of your application structure. But you could always create a model function and call that from the functions in your controller.
CodeIgniter also comes with some built in functionality to help you send emails, specifically setting some of your email settings in a config file so you don't have to rewrite that. http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/libraries/email.html
I actually wrote a blog post about this not too terribly long ago. Have a look at this:
http://blog.sendgrid.com/using-sendgrid-with-php-codeigniter/
Essentially, codeigniter comes with an awesome email library that makes it easy to send stuff over SMTP, so I just show you how to hook into that.
Greetings,
I will certainly hope someone will be able to provide some enlightenment to my problem.
Currently, I have 2 joomla sites, layout and menus are a replicate of the other.
I noticed that on both Joomla, I will occasionally encounter "Unable to send mail" after a form submission.
Is this the fault of my server, or the fault of Joomla's PHP Mailer ? I will certainly love to approach my hosting company for a solution but I do not want to place a false accusation on them.
By default, Joomla will use PHP's mail() function, although you can set it to use other methods (sendmail, SMTP) in the Global Configuration on the Server tab.
The best way to test this would be to set up a small PHP script that sends a message through mail(). Next time you see the message, try running the small script and see if that one fails as well.
I personally preffer using an SMTP server for mailing purpose. I guess your hosting company has provided something like smtp.yourdomain.com
You may use it.
Else, you can use the gmail server smtp.gmail.com
It wont disappoint you for sure.
I have a problem that I feel is best implimented in a stand alone windows application, but needs to pass data to a web page that is already open.
Is it possible to pass the data directly to the web page?
If so, what is the best way to go about it?
(Its my first question, so go easy on me!)
This is not going to be an easy problem to solve, but I think it's possible by hosting the web-page in a browser embedded in a .NET application. This Code-Project article might help
Also this article talks a bit about accessing the DOM through a C# application.
Have you got any requirements on language? And can you add a bit more detail about exactly what you're trying to achieve?
EDIT 1: Watij is a web-application testing framework for Java. You can use it to fill in text-boxes, click buttons etc. I think it might fit your needs and, if it doesn't, it's open-source, so you might be able to hack it to work. There is a whole family of Wati* products - Watin for .NET, Watir for Ruby, etc.
Getting access to external web pages are not permitted due to security credentials.
But you can open and write to a web page via winInet APIs.
Please go through the article
http://www.informit.com/library/content.aspx?b=Visual_C_PlusPlus&seqNum=107
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX, I get a fairly good grasp of what AJAX is. However, it looks like in order to learn it, I'd have to delve into multiple technologies at the same time to get any benefit out of it. So two questions:
What are resources that can help me understand/use AJAX?
What sort of website would benefit from AJAX?
If you aren't interested in the nitty gritty, you could use a higher-level library like JQuery or Prototype to create the underlying Javascript for you. The main benefit is a vastly more responsive user interface for web-based applications.
There are many libraries out there that can help you get benefit out of AJAX without learning about implementing callbacks, etc.
Are you using .NET? Look at http://ajax.asp.net. If you're not, then take a look at tools like qcodo for PHP, and learn about prototype.js, jquery, etc.
As far as websites that would benefit: Every web application ever. :) Anything you interact with by exchanging information, not just by clicking a link and reading an article.
Every website can benefit from AJAX, but in my opinion the biggest benefit to AJAX comes in data entry sections - forms basically. I have done entire sites where the front end - the part the user sees had almost no AJAX functionality in it. All the AJAX stuff was in the administration control panel for assisting in (correct!) data entry.
There is nothing worse than submitting a form and getting back an error, using AJAX you can pretty much prevent this for everything but file uploads.
I find it easiest to just stay away from all the frameworks and other helpers and just do basic Javascript. This not only lets you understand what's going on under the covers, it also lets you do it in the simplest way possible. There's really not much to it. User the JS XML DOM objects to create an xml document client side. Sent it to the server with XMLHTTPRequest, and then process the result, again using the JS XML DOM objects. Start with something simple. Just try sending one piece of information to the server, and getting a small piece of information back.
The Mozilla documentation is good. Sites that benefit from it the most are ones that behave almost like a desktop application and need high interactivity. You can usually improve usability on almost any site by using it, however.
Ajax should be thought of as a means to alter some content on a page without reloading the entire page.
So when do you need to do this? Really only when you have some user interactions or form information that you want to keep intact while you change some content on the page.