newbie PHP'er: need contact form in php w/ form validation & Xbrowser/ver ie6-9

phendyr

Hello All,
I am new to the forum, and a web designer by trade, with little backend experience, but I'm currently trying to research how to build a basic contact form that will include form validation and be cross browser compatible - I do have to support ie 6 as well.

If there are any tutorials, or working examples that I can be pointed towards I would greatly appreciate it. Most of what I've found on the web so far have been blogs about it, that have a dozen replies telling the OP how they did it wrong :queasy:

Thanks in advance, I really appreciate the help in learning how to accomplish this!

🙂

anakadote

Are you looking for server-side form validation using PHP or clients-side using Javascript? Server-side languages, like PHP, work independent of what web browser is being used to serve the website, so you wouldn't have any compatibility issues there. I would recommend buying a beginner book on PHP that has a tutorial on building a contact form—I'm sure a lot of them do. If you're looking for Javascript validation I would suggest looking into jQuery which is a Javascript library that can help you and is, for the most part, compatible with most browsers used today.

johanafm

And don't forget that even if you do use javascript validation, your php scripts must still always perform validation and sanitizing input.

phendyr

thanks for the feedback, any recommendations on books? I know there's a lot out there, and have bought my share of crappy guides in the past.

thanks again

fr33lanc3

When I started learning PHP, I bought this book.
PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson

It is good, these days I prefer Google to find an answer for anything though.