Can't capture the URL!

psimonis

Here's the situation:

We have "recommend-This" buttons on every page of our site.
The visitor presses the button and is taken to the "recommend this" form.

What we want is to capture the URL address of the page the
visitor wants to recommend and insert it into the email that
will be sent to the recipient.

We can send the email to the friend.
We can receive an email to ourselves - letting us know that
a recommendation was sent and also letting us know whether
the sender wants to be included in our "Opt-in" list.

What we can't do is get the darn URL of the recommended page.

We have managed to send the php script to the recipient, though (which is progress - in a way)

We've tried $REQUEST_URI to no avail.

We are terribly new to php. Is there a working example someplace that we can use as a reference?

Do we need to call out a HTTP request?

What do we need to define in the form.html?

We're close?

Thanks for any assistance in this matter.

Paula

yelvington

Create a page containing the following PHP code:

<? phpinfo() ?>

Make a link to that page from another page.

With your browser, follow the link and inspect the results closely.

bad_goose

The variable $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] contains the request. So to insert in a link, you could do something like this:

<a href="/reccomend.php?page=<?=urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])?>">reccomend this page</a>

Then in reccomend.php you could get the reccomended URI from the variable $_GET['page'] .

Or, if you are unable to insert variables into the link like that, you can simply use $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] in reccomend.php to get the refferer page.

Does that solve your problem?

psimonis

So you know, we're working on it! We'll let you know soon.

psimonis

Originally posted by bad_goose
The variable $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] contains the request. So to insert in a link, you could do something like this:
<a href="/reccomend.php?page=<?=urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])?>">reccomend this page</a>
Actually, I DO need some clarification. Does the above href go into the form.html or into the php script? I'm confused because you say "Then..."

Then in reccomend.php you could get the reccomended URI from the variable $_GET['page'] .

Or, if you are unable to insert variables into the link like that, you can simply use $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] in reccomend.php to get the refferer page.

Does that solve your problem? [/B]

As I pointed out in the original post, we are painfully new.

Thanks,

Paula

psimonis

Okay, Bad-Goose, here's what happened;

We got the Recommend-This Form Page. We actually danced around the living room for a while. However... how do we get the
page that the visitor is actually referring?

The button we use sends the visitor to another page, which is the email form.

Do we use the history.back function?

Thanks,

Paula

bad_goose

Okay, ignore what I said about creating a link using REQUEST_URI. (I was assuming that all your pages are php, which probably isn't true.)

$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] always returns the previous page - there's no way to get the addresses of pages further back in the history than that. So what you need to do is make your reccomend-this form page be a php script.

Then, that script can use $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] to get the address of the reccomended page, and then it can output the email form with a hidden input containing that URL. So when that form is submitted to your other e-mail script you will get the reccomended URL through the form data (from that hidden input).

So all you have to do is:

Rename the reccomend form page from .html to .php (remember to change your links to it)
Add this line somewhere between the form tags on that page:

<input type="hidden" name="pageurl" value="<?=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']?>">
Then in your emailer script, you can get the url from the variable $_GET['pageurl'] and insert it into the message.

See if that works. If it does, you could even look at combining both php scripts into one, which would be a little more complicated.

psimonis

My partner and I figured it had to go something like this. However, our first attempt did not work out well. Since I have a regular job to deal with, I'm doing that and my partner's doing the other thing. I think we're close, though.

Thank you very much for the details.