PHP Tutorial: Writing Your First PHP Script: A Feedback Form (a FormMail Script) (thesitewizard.com)
PHP Tutorial: Writing A Feedback Form Script
Getting Started with PHP: Write a FormMail Script in PHP
PHP Tutorial: Writing Your First PHP Script: Feedback Form Script
by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com
I have always believed that the most fun way to learn a new programming language, whether it is
a language like C or a scripting language like PHP, is to use it to write a real-life useful
program. Of course this is not the most systematic method of learning, but it works well if you
already have some background in programming.
Preliminaries
Before you write your first PHP program, make sure that your website is running on
a web host
that runs PHP 4.1 or above.
You may also find it useful to have a copy of PHP 4.1 or later installed on your own computer. This makes testing your PHP scripts much easier.
If you use Windows, you can find some tips on installing PHP on your own computer from my article on
"How to Install and Configure PHP 5 to Run with Apache on Windows" at
http://http://www.zjjv.com///php/install-php-5-apache-windows.shtml
And of course, you will need
an ASCII text editor of some kind (such as Notepad on Windows).
There's a list of such editors
on http://http://www.zjjv.com///programming/editors.shtml
This tutorial also assumes that you have at least some knowledge of HTML. This is necessary
because if I have to explain all the HTML tags as well, this tutorial will end up being tediously long.
You'll probably need a bit of programming background, or at the very least, an aptitude for computer programming. Note that
being able to code in HTML does not count, since HTML is not a programming language. Unlike the majority of the other
articles on thesitewizard.com, this article is not targeted at the absolute newcomer. You really need background in both web design
using HTML and a bit of programming skill/aptitude, otherwise this article will be indecipherable. If you are reading this article because you want
to create a website, please start with How
to Make / Create Your Own Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide instead.
I will begin with a very rudimentary (but working) PHP script to take input from a feedback form
and send it to you in an email message. This type of form is sometimes referred to as a
FormMail
or Form to Mail script. In later articles, I will develop that script (and others) to
include features commonly found in such FormMail scripts.
If you are programming-savvy, you will recognize this as a sort of "Hello World" program, but infinitely more useful!
Writing the Feedback Form
The first thing we need to do is to write the feedback form itself. Put the following code
in the <body> section of an HTML file named, say, feedback.html.
<form method="post" action="sendmail.php">
Email: <input type="text" /><br />
Message:<br />
<textarea rows="15" cols="40">
</textarea><br />
<input type="submit" />
</form>
Basically the form asks the visitor for his email address (the field named "email" found in
input above) and message (the field named "message" found in
textarea), and presents him with a button which he can click to
submit the contents of the form. When the form is submitted, it is "posted" (see the "method"
attribute of the <form> tag) to a script named "sendmail.php" (also specified in the
<form> tag).
The Feedback Form PHP Script
Now all that remains is to code "sendmail.php". This is made extremely easy by the facilities
available in PHP. Type the following code into a file named "sendmail.php". Do not put anything
else into that file, ie, don't put in any other HTML tags or headers, etc.
<?php
$email = $_REQUEST['email'] ;
$message = $_REQUEST['message'] ;
mail( "yourname@example.com", "Feedback Form Results",
$message, "From: $email" );
header( "Location: http://http://www.zjjv.com///thankyou.html" );
?>
When the form is submitted to sendmail.php, the contents of the "email" field in the form is
put into a PHP variable called $_REQUEST['email']. Likewise the contents of the
"message" field is put into the variable $_REQUEST['message'].
If you had named the fields in your form "emailofsender" and "contentsofmessage", then
the information submitted in those fields would have been available to your script in
the variables $_REQUEST['emailofsender'] and $_REQUEST['contentsofmessage'] respectively.
I think you get the idea.
The first thing we do in our PHP script is to make the information that is submitted
easily accessible to the rest of the program.
Firstly, we made a copy of the contents of $_REQUEST['email'] in a variable we call
$email. This was done in the line
$email = $_REQUEST['email'] ;
Note that we don't really have to call this new variable $email. We could have called
it $thingamajig if we wished, but it makes sense to name a variable with some meaningful name.
Likewise, in the next line, we made a copy of $_REQUEST['message'] in a variable
$message. That is, we assigned the value of $_REQUEST['message'] to $message.
$message = $_REQUEST['message'] ;
Again, we could have named the new variable anything we wanted — but it's easier
for us to understand the program if the variable name reflects what it does.
The real workhorse of this script is in the line beginning with "mail".
mail( "yourname@example.com", "Feedback Form Results",
$message, "From: $email" );
mail is a special function in PHP that sends mail.
The first parameter to mail is supposed to contain the email address you want the form
contents to be sent to, such as your own email address. The second parameter is the "Subject"
of the email message. The last two parameters are the content of the message and the
headers you want sent, respectively. We want a "From" header so that
we know who is sending the email to us and can reply to him/her if we need to.
Notice that, like many other programming languages, strings (sequences of characters)
are enclosed in double quotes, such as "Feedback Form Results".
Variables like $message can be used as-is. Note also that you can also
interpolate (introduce) the contents of the variable $email into a string, like
"From: $email", so that if your $email string contained an address like
"william@shakespeare.com", the final string that is passed to the mail function will be
"From: william@shakespeare.com".
You can also use single quotes (such as those in 'Hi there') to quote strings, but when
you do so, the variables included are not expanded. This is useful if, for some reason, you
really want to pass the string 'From: $email' to mail without PHP translating that to
"From: william@shakespeare.com".
Finally, it is appropriate to thank the visitor for his message. This is done with the
line
header( "Location: http://http://www.zjjv.com///thankyou.html" );
This line causes PHP to send an HTTP header back to the visitor's browser telling it to
load the URL "http://http://www.zjjv.com///thankyou.html". The "header" function allows us to send
any HTTP header to the browser.
You will of course have to create such a file called "thankyou.html" with some sort of message to
thank your visitor for his efforts, otherwise your visitor will be greeted with an unfriendly
"404 File Not
Found" error after he sends his message. You should also replace the URLs and email addresses
with the correct ones if you want to use that script on your site.
By the way, the script has to be enclosed within the "<?php" and "?>" tags because the
PHP processor treats all input as HTML code unless otherwise specified. On most systems,
you can simply use "<?" and "?>" as the opening and closing tags to get the script
to work, however if you want to be sure that your script will work on all systems, you should use the full
"<?php" form for the opening tag.
Conclusion
Easy wasn't it? In just a few lines, you've written your first PHP script. And it's not some
trivial and useless script — it is actually a working, usable program.
However, before you put the script "live" on the Internet, you should check out the following additional tutorials:
In How to Add
Form Validation, Disable Browser Caching and Embed HTML with PHP, you will develop the script so that your
visitor's input is checked to catch instances where someone accidentally clicks the "Submit" button before
they fill in their email address. You will also learn
how to integrate both the form and the script into a single "feedback.php" file if you wish.
The article
How to Prevent Email Injection in Your PHP Form to Mail Scripts
deals with the security aspects of putting a PHP form to mail script "live" on the Internet, where spammers can abuse it and hijack it
to send spam to others.
If, after reading this article, you decide that it's too much of a hassle to write your own script,
you may want to get one of those free PHP scripts written by others to do the job for you instead.
Those looking for a feedback form script can simply go to my
Free Feedback Form Wizard
to generate your own customised feedback form script. For other types of scripts, please see the list on
thefreecountry.com's Free PHP Scripts page.
Copyright 2000-2014 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
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on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from http://http://www.zjjv.com///
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This page was last updated on 27 January 2014.
