How to get a form to submit without the user needing to use e-mail client

[IT_Freek]

Hi fellow members,

 

I was recently tasked with creating a website for future 6th form students in the area to look at and apply for courses at all of our partnership schools. Everything so far has gone ok up until the registration page.

 

At the minute the page for registration i have got is as follows:

Application form

 

As you may or may not be able to see, the submit type i have currently got is mailto:'emailaddress' which works fine but always wants to load up microsoft outlook which is a cause for concern as most students do not use mail clients and therefore wont submit forms to us.

 

I have been looking into other methods of submitting the data to us without the need to load an e-mail client but to no avail. I have heard of CGI-scripts such as formmail.pl, which can handle forms but the method to doing it is too long winded for me.

 

To cut a long story short i want users to be able to submit a module registration form to us without having to e-mail me the form using outlook. Any suggestions/examples of a way to do this would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for reading

Paul

 

P.S. The website is still a work in progress.

[LosOjos]

If your sites server has PHP enabled it's very simple to add PHP in to the form, that way it'll send straight from the page

 

How to Send Email from a PHP Script - About Email

 

Not to be funny, but you may want to reconsider the choice of colours, green on green could be difficult to read for some users. This site might give you a few ideas

Edited January 20, 2010 by LosOjos

[srochford]

You definitely want to look at either PHP or ASP/ASP.Net for the web page.

 

Also, what currently happens to the data which is received by email? I'm guessing someone then keys it into a database. If you write your web page properly it will just put the data straight into a database, saving re-keying.

 

You would need to add some human validation (to stop people entering "Mickey Mouse" etc) but this can be as simple as having a field which says "checked" - the web page sets this to false, the human checking just sets it to true and you only deal with ones where checked equals true.

[IT_Freek]

Many thanks for the replies

 

Yeah i don't like the green on green either but its what the boss wants, i might be cheeky and put forward a different color scheme.

 

Ive had a good look into the PHP link you sent me and kind of gave it a try but i have a feeling that the server doesn't allow php as when i now click submit i get asked if i want to download the PHP file. Either that or i have coded it wrong somewhere following the tutorials.

 

With regards to ASP would that require me to make a database in MS Access and convet it to a MySQL database? As you may have gathered im a bit of a rookie when it comes to anything outside of HTML such as PHP and other languages (as im not employed as an ICT guy) but can easily pick up things with the right help.

I think i need to confirm with our network manager that the server we are renting can run both of the scripts.

 

Again, many thanks for the replies and any further help/comments would be really appreciated

 

P.S.

Eventually we will need some sort of database to log all the registered students so their details can be sent over to the right school etc but haven't yet got round to setting that up. Before i tried out the PHP script, the form would mail itself to me as a POST file as long as MS Outlook or a similar e-mail client is installed and setup. The mailto function works but the messages that popup and the need to have a client setup make it seem less appealing especially for the kids who gave it a test for me.

Edited January 20, 2010 by IT_Freek
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