Simple form advice for holding page

simisker · 10 Mar 2010 at 18:49

'lo all!

Right, I'm preparing a holding page for someone's new business venture:

http://www.plasticle.co.uk/

You'll see that there's a little form to collect email addresses of interested viewers. Obviously, when the site eventually goes live, those who've submitted their email addresses will receive an email informing them such.

Currently it's just a POST with a mailto, which is barely acceptable on lots of levels.

So what's the best way of getting this email capturing implemented?

As ever: ta in advance

Pho · 10 Mar 2010 at 20:21

A site that designs emails which needs help with email?

.

At a very simple level, something like this (untested):

Change your form action to a subscribe page:

PHP:

<form autocomplete="off" method="post" action="subscribe.php">

On that subscribe.php have something like this:

PHP:

<?php
// No email so just bounce back to the main site
If (!isset($_REQUEST['contact-form-email'])) {
		header( 'Location: http://www.plasticle.co.uk/') ;
}

// Do some email validation here
$email_address = $_REQUEST['contact-form-email'];

if(mail("[email protected]", "Let me know when Plasticle goes live!", $email_address)) {
	$result = "Email address accepted, thank you.";
} else {
	$result = "An error occurred, please try again.";
}
?>

<html>
<p>Wrap this inside your normal template</p>
<?php echo $result ?>
</html>

A better way would be to dump their email into a database though.

simisker · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:55

Pho said:
A site that designs emails which needs help with email? [...]

Aw, come on - it's a web page! The irony isn't lost on me, though, don't worry

I was hoping to do without the need for several pages. I'm sure Typekit, for instance, managed it when they pre-launched their service. Probably some whizzbang AJAXy stuff that I need to look into.

Ta for the comprehensive reply, though, Pho

Russinating · 10 Mar 2010 at 23:57

Do you have PHP/MySQL access? I could knock something up in 5 minutes if you do.

Pho · 11 Mar 2010 at 00:21

simisker said:
Aw, come on - it's a web page! The irony isn't lost on me, though, don't worry

I was hoping to do without the need for several pages. I'm sure Typekit, for instance, managed it when they pre-launched their service. Probably some whizzbang AJAXy stuff that I need to look into.

If you set your form's action to action="" the form will post back to the same page, you can then include that mail code at the top of the page without the need for more pages.

You can use jQuery to submit the email via AJAX (using what I've already written) without too much effort. Have a look at this plugin for jQuery which will do just that - http://malsup.com/jquery/form/

simisker · 11 Mar 2010 at 00:25

Thanks for the offer, Russ, but I've just implemented a simple form from EmailMeForm, which has done the trick for now

EDIT: And thanks again, Pho - that link may just come in handy down the line

I do have an even simpler follow-up noob question:

For future work, am I right in thinking that PHP will be set up by default without me having to do a cpanel-based install or anything? It's hosted on TSOHost.

Tripnologist · 11 Mar 2010 at 01:37

PHP is installed on most servers by default. The only time it may not be is if you're on Windows Server where you're expected to use .net.

simisker · 11 Mar 2010 at 06:49

Smashing. Cheers, Trip