Software to create a feedback form?

Get Started
1

I am trying to find a good, easy-to-use software program that can create a simple feedback form for our public library website, so that our patrons can send us comments and suggestions. I don’t want to buy a whole web-design program like DreamWeaver since our pages are simple HTML/CSS and I do the coding manually. Can anyone recommend a good small program that will create all the necessary coding that I can then just plug into my html pages? We want the form results to be sent to us by email.

Also, will we need to adjust anything on our server to make forms work?

Advice and/or suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

2

Hi centaurea

There are many ways to to this. The ideal is to code a nice secure form yourself, or have it done for you, but there are lots of other options available.

For example, there are various online form builders, such as

These seem to be pretty good, and hopefully provide clear instructions on how to use them

You can also download some free form-to-email scripts and add them to your site yourself. They are widely used and are pretty popular, although I’m not too sure how secure they really are. Examples include

http://www.thesitewizard.com/
http://www.formmail.com/
http://www.dtheatre.com/scripts/formmail.php
http://www.thesitewizard.com/wizards/feedbackform.shtml
http://www.thefreecountry.com/scripthosting/formtomail.shtml
http://www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html
http://formtoemail.com/
http://www.maketemplate.com/feedback/

Some services also allow you to put a form on your site which is submitted to their site for processing. I would personally avoid this, as it’s a bit clunky, but here’s an example:

http://www.mailmyform.com/

There are lots of other options again if you Google “form to email scripts” etc, but perhaps I’ve given you too many options anyway!

will we need to adjust anything on our server to make forms work?

Most forms are powered by PHP, and most servers (all but the worst ones) will have full support for PHP all ready to go. So in all likelihood, you won’t have to do anything at all in that regard.

Hope this answer helps. :slight_smile:

3

I wish I could, but I have been trying to learn javascript for the past 3 years and still find it utterly incomprehensible. :frowning:

Security is essential, so I’m reluctant to try these - or services which have to go through a third party.

I will definitely check these out!

I’ll have to ask our hardware guy about that - the server is old (probably will be replaced soon), so it may not be set up for PHP.

Thanks for your help, Ralph! :slight_smile:

4

Yes, it’s not easy. Although, it’s better to use PHP for sending forms. But then there’s another big learning curve! It’s not actually hard to learn enough PHP to send a form, though. That’s about as far as I got!

5

I didn’t know that. In fact, I don’t even know what PHP is. :blush:

Sounds like it might be worth a try - I’ll look into it. Thank you!

6

Most of those links above were to PHP forms, such as

http://www.formmail.com/

Have a look at the instructions there and see if they make any sense. If not, just post back.

PHP is an open source language like JavaScript. It is used to power a lot of content management systems etc. JavaScript is typically handled by your browser, while PHP is processed by the server before the HTML pages are sent to the browser. Thus, you can store email addresses in PHP and nobody will ever get to see them.

Here’s a nice introduction on Wikipedia:

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document.

Here’s an introduction to PHP if you want a little tour. Of course, there’s a lot more available on the web.

If you want a really simple example of PHP, create a web page on your server called something like test.php and place this code on the page:

<?php 
$timestamp = time();
echo date("F jS, Y", $timestamp);
?>

Navigate to the page in your browser, and you should see the current date displayed.

7

Thank you, Ralph! :slight_smile:

8

I found one cool site whith php tutorials and form builder
http://phpforms.net/tutorial/tutorial.html :slight_smile:

9

Thanks Evawins, I will check that out. :slight_smile:

10

Keep in mind that anything in javascript alone is not secure. It will help ensure that honest users fill out the form correctly, but for a truly secure form you need to do some kind of server-side validation.