Dynamic FeebackForm Module

dougal85

[FONT=Tahoma]I am attempting a small project and I was wondering if anybody had any advice. I want to create a feeback form that can be easily plugged into any website.

The idea is to have some PHP code that can be configured easily by changing a few settings and plugged into any site.

(for the time being all these will send the contents to an email address but i may add options for that later)

For example user 1 only wants a name and comment field.

User 2 of the form wants a Name, email, comment field and a drop down menu with a section of x number of things.

So that's the scenario (btw if you've taken the time to read even this far thanks 🙂

I have been racking my mind on ways to solve this problem. First i thought the person could manually put the names into variables of all the form objects however I thought this could be a bit of a hassle. Is it possible to do a search for all the fields from a specific form name? is this a security issue?

My second thought would be to try and take a bit of an OOP approach. You could create a new form phpobject and then add fields etc. to it... the information for this could be stored fairly easily in maybe a con-fig file. At least this way it wouldn't require them to make the form in HTML and then recreate the data so PHP can see it.

That's my first two initial thoughts... any suggestions on them would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks![/FONT]

**Update : retarded grammer. Oops

sneakyimp

This sounds useful. It has occurred to me to make such a thing too.

The big issue is that forms have a number of different kinds of inputs and inputs can have different length restrictions and stuff.

If you just want to make a bunch of text entry fields then it sounds pretty easy. Just let the user define the mail to address in a var and all the field names in an array and then you can loop through the array to display the form. when the form gets submitted, you can just wrap up all the POST information and email it to the email address in the config.

something like

<?
$mailto = 'me@mydomain.com';
$fields = array('name', 'address', 'city', 'st', 'zip');

if ($_POST['submit']) {
  // gather up the fields
  $mesg = '';
  foreach($fields as $field) {
    $mesg .= $field . ':' . $_POST['field'] . "\n";
  }
  mail($mailto, 'FORM SUBMISSION', $mesg);
  die('thanks for your submission.');
} else {
  // display the form
?>
<html>
<form method="post" action="<?=$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] ?>">
<?
  foreach($fields as $field) {
    echo $field . ':<input type="text" name="' . $field . '"><br>';
  }
?>
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
</html>
<?
} // if POST
?>

dougal85

Yeah, that's quite a good way to look at it. I thought if it was object orientated you could make it quite easy to use too.

Here is a rough example, (I'm going to write this without testing, so don't take it as working, demonstration only ... using notepad, so I'll probably even have some typing mistakes)

<?php

// add file with classes [doesn't actually exist]
require_once('phpform.class.php');

$form = new form('formanme', 'email@tosend.to');

$form->addtextfield('name', 'maxlength');

// there could also be support for specific types?

$form->addemailfield('name');


//then finally we can create the whole form with one simple line


$form->toString();

?>

I realise that's a very general example and I didn't even attempt to create the classes... but I think it should give you an idea of what i mean? If not tell me and I'll put a better explanation in.

It's a bit more technical than the one posted before me, however I think given some examples it would soon seem very easy. The intended audience would be for somebody with little technical knowledge, but I'm going to assume at least some HTML since they would need to add something to a page.

Any comments on this method would be great.