Contact Forms. Question on 'Build your own Website' book

[John Miles]

Hi. This is my first post. I am a complete beginner and am working through the 'Build your own Website the Right Way' book. Everything has been going well (maybe too well!!!) and I have just finished Chapter 7 on
Forms. My form looked fine until I did the work on the Freeback site. Once I had pasted all the alterations
to the 'Contact' html, my lovely looking form changed. I have used the form and it works fine, sending me
the information I requested etc ........ but it doesn't look pretty at all. It is as if it has lost its connection with my css .... the fonts in the form are the wrong colour, wrong size, the boxes for answers aren't aligned properly and the submit button has lost all the button area css. I have checked the code as carefully as possible and run it through a second time, but still no joy.
I imagine this is a very simple issue but would be extremely grateful for any help. Many thanks John

[ralph.m]

Hi John. Welcome to SitePoint.

Is your site online yet? If you could provide a link, that would make it a lot easier to assess what's going on here.

[John Miles]

Thanks for your quick reply.
No this is not my own site, which I have hardly started yet.
This is the example site, BubbleUnder.com used in the Sitepoint book. I have worked through the book creating the site as suggested. In Chapter 7 after creating a good looking contact form for the BubbleUnder site, the reader is asked to register with Freedback.com, create a form with them, then copy and paste parts of the code they create from your form questions, into the contact html for the BubbleUnder site. When I did this and saved my amended contact html, I then opened the contact page to find that the form had changed radically. As I said in my first post, it is as if the css has been lost from the form. The rest of the page is the same as before, it is just the formatting inside the form. I then filled in imaginary answers to the questions on my form and submitted it. This worked fine and I soon received an Email with these answers on it.
I hope this clarifies my position. Many thanks. John

[John Miles]

Hi, anyone who is reading this. I've found the answer to my problem ........... in a previous post. 'Build your own website Chapter 7 .... Conflict between CSS and Freeback.com form code'. This was posted on April 25 2010 by Strong. What a fantastic relief to read this and solve my problem. As a complete novice I am beginning to understand why you are all so addicted to this 'stuff' ............ you get such a buzz out of solving a problem!!!! Anyway thanks to 'Strong' and 'Mittineague' who had a good interchange of ideas on this subject back in 2010. You have made my day, guys!!
Just for the record the problem lies in an error in the final code Ian Lloyd puts in the book on page 291. On the first line it should read <form enctype="multipart/form-data" class="contact" method="post" ......... etc. In the book the class="contact" is missing.
I am really enjoying this book, but I wonder why this error has not been corrected already. I have the 3rd edition and only bought it a couple of months ago from Amazon so you would have thought it was a recent edition.
Anyway, great relief all round. John.

[ralph.m]

Thanks for posting back, John, and well done for finding the solution yourself. It would be worth sending a message to SP HQ to alert them to the error. There is an errata page for the book, but it looks like no one has submitted an error yet. (As you say, if this was in the previous version too, that's a shame.)

[John Miles]

Thanks for your post, ralph. I have Emailed Sitepoint so hopefully there won't be too many more puzzled readers when they reach this point in the book.

[xhtmlcoder]

Off Topic:

I wish you luck John, as I have reported various errata on the third edition of the book the week it was released. Unfortunately they failed to respond in any human form but don't let that deter you from trying, you might hit lucky?

[John Miles]

That's very disappointing but let's wait and see. I'll post any reply to let you know how I get on.

[ingenyes]

Personally I like mucking around with contact forms and there are some great and easy to use scripts out there. But one easy alternative is to use Wufoo because it doesn't need to be installed. It's an online form builder that is very easy to use. You can link it to your website so it looks like its just a normal form mail script. But if you don't have a website you can simply direct people to Wufoo and they can fill out a form there. (handy if you are running a one off campaign or contest).

www.wufoo.com

It is a paid service but the do have a free version as well. My company used it for a campaign that we ran and that was the first time I'd ever come across it. It's amazing how much stuff is out there in a online - so you don't have to go to the effort to do any work.

Always a good thing!