Please help with Contact Form and Formloom

sarahinthelakes

I have been at this for about 5 hours and I really don't want to be girlie but I am ready to burst into tears. I have completed and published a website for a local business and have tried all manner of ways to get the contact form and formloom to work and they just won't, no matter how much I try different settings. When I tested it on my server, before transferring everything went perfectly. Now I am getting the message from the contact form to say it has been sent, but nothing in email. The form loom form comes up with an error in processing. I am so frustrated with this (sorry, I know I am not the first, from searching the forum). The server is

streamline.net

I have pulled up some info from the hosting site

EXAMPLE: 'FORM TO MAIL' SCRIPT USING PHP (LINUX ONLY)

Important You are responsible for the misuse of any scripts on your website. See our article Securing your web scripts for further details.

This article gives an example of how to use a PHP script to take input from a feedback form and send it to you in an email message.

Note: PHP pages will not work if placed in cgi-bin. They need to be in the htdocs directory.

Example
The following example uses a PHP script to take input from a feedback form and send it to you in an email message.

First of all, you need a form to receive the data, e.g. Feedback.php:

Feedback.php

The form asks the visitor for his/her email address (via the email field above) and message (via the message field above), and invites the visitor to click a button to submit the contents of the form. When the form is submitted, it is 'posted' to a script named sendmail.php. Next, you need to create the sendmail.php script, using the facilities available in PHP, e.g.

Sendmail.php

When the form is submitted to sendmail.php, the contents of the email field in the form are inserted into a PHP variable called $email, and the contents of the message field are inserted into the variable $message. The script calls a special function called mail, which takes care of the actual dispatch. The first parameter to mail is the address to which you want the form contents sent, in this case your own email address. The second parameter is the subject of the email message, the third is the content of the message, and the fourth is the "From" header so that you know who the sender is, and can reply.

In order for the script to work, you need to specify, via a fifth -f parameter, the domain from which the mail is being sent(-froot@yourdomain.co.uk). The PHP component uses SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), and all StreamlineNet SMTP servers have filters which ensure that the data returned by either the first or fifth mail parameter relates to one of your domains hosted by StreamlineNet. The final part of the script thanks the visitor for the message. This is done by sending an HTTP header back to the visitor's browser telling it to load a file called thankyou.html from your domain. The /header/function allows you to send any HTTP header back to the browser.

Note: The script has to be enclosed within the

sarahinthelakes

In the meantime I have removed the Form Loom page and set the Contact Pages to come to me, which is not ideal, but better than me looking an idiot.

That probably doesn't help anyone trying to help me now does it.

Fed up

sarahinthelakes

Lots of people viewing but no help as yet!

I have just had a response from the guy who runs the group (he is a web designer - so no pressure there then!) and he has said

It is a Linux server, but you may need to add parameters to the PHP mailer script to allow the domain, particularly the -froot...

Something like...

// now send the email
mail($to,$subject,$body,"From: website at yourdomain.com\r\nContent-Type: text/html\r\n",'-froot at yourdomain.com');

I thought that any settings may be sorted out when you ticked the right box in Form Loom - if I was just using the Contact Form, where would I insert such code??

I remain hopeful!

sa3305

Hi
This is probably not what you want to hear , but I had so many problems with the RW contact forms and my server I decided to use a third party called http://www.mycontactform.com

This worked everytime with no hassles what so ever. The RW forms never worked correctly with my server.

Are you using Fasthosts ? I ask because they use htdocs as their root folder, thats who i use.

sarahinthelakes

on 1281042702:

Hi
This is probably not what you want to hear , but I had so many problems with the RW contact forms and my server I decided to use a third party called http://www.mycontactform.com

This worked everytime with no hassles what so ever. The RW forms never worked correctly with my server.

Are you using Fasthosts ? I ask because they use htdocs as their root folder, thats who i use.

Hi there and thanks for responding to my plea!!

My client is using Streamnet and they use htdocs, I have some advice today re adding froot@.... to the email variables as someone kindly checked my code. I am going to duplicate a page and not show in menu so I can do more testing without annoying anyone - it worked fine on my UK2 server - which is just as confusing as I usually have probs with them with the forms - ak! The whole setup seems more fickle than me on a bad day!

Thanks for link, I will check it out if I don't get any joy - I really want to know what I am doing wrong though!

I wonder if anyone else has experience of adding this extra 'froot' code. Maybe FL adds it when you tick one of their options - I will try all options again and look at the code this time. I was so frustrated yesterday it didn't occur to me to do this

Thanks again

NormanT

Sarah,

First thing I have noticed is that you need to change the server from Windows to Linux as Form Loom requires php5.3 to work. Get Streamline to do this immediately and then you will need some php scripts as well, which I think you can get on Stream line's site or click here

The other thing I would recommend you get hold of Larry (Sundog's) book on FormLoom from here

Regards
Norman

sarahinthelakes

on 1281103977:

Sarah,

First thing I have noticed is that you need to change the server from Windows to Linux as Form Loom requires php5.3 to work. Get Streamline to do this immediately and then you will need some php scripts as well, which I think you can get on Stream line's site or click here

The other thing I would recommend you get hold of Larry (Sundog's) book on FormLoom from here

Regards
Norman

Thanks Normal, Sundog's books are just what I need - I have bought the CSS and the 2 Form Loom ones, I shall settle down to some serious coffee time reading

I don't really care if I am being particularly thick here, I have the scripts, but have no idea whereabouts (logistically!) to put them in my code Hoping Sundog's books will help me work this one out. Actually just had a lightbulb moment - should I be putting the script in the PHP override box - the one we're advised not to go near?! Okay, off to make coffee and do reading.

sarahinthelakes

Several days later and now everything is working - don't ask me why, I am baffled!

Just for interest, I emailed yabdab and they confirmed that you shouldn't need to change any of the php settings as Formloom does this for you.

I am not convinced I shall not have probs again with other servers. It would be impossible to have the right answer for all of them there are so many.

Maybe we could post our settings for the servers that we get out forms working on to create a reference list for people to look up? If anyone thinks this is a good idea I could start a new topic in the tips section.