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Mailform2

WARNING: This recipe broke when PmWiki acquired the (:input...:) directive in version 2.0beta44. It works with the native form handling in newer versions of PmWiki, but you must make a small modification to mailform2.phpΔ and you must edit config.php (which you had to before as well).

Question

How do I set up a mail form so that visitors can send comments or suggestions to a limited list of recipients?

Answer

Software installation

Download mailform2.phpΔ into the cookbook/ directory and place the following line in your config.php:

   include_once('cookbook/mailform2.php'); 

mailform2.php will install a handler for ?action=mailform2 which will send a mail if given the right parameters.

Designing the mail form

In PmWiki 2.1.11 and up

This may work in any version since 2.0beta44 which has native form input, but I've only tested it in 2.1.11. You MUST modify one line in mailform2.php and edit your config.php -- see below.

The following is for a basic contact form which only sends mail to an address predefined in config.php (see below). It will generate a form with an input box for the subject and the message.

  (:input form "http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/PATH/TO/pmwiki.php?action=mailform2" post:)
  Subject: (:input text name="mail-subject" value="DEFAULT VALUE":)\\
  (:input textarea name="mail-text" rows=10 cols=65:)\\
  (:input submit value="Send Message":)
  (:input end:)

Want the subject to be hidden and unchangeable by the sender? Change the "text" to "hidden":

  (:input hidden name="mail-subject" value="SUBJECT TEXT":)

The old way

Mail forms are built using the markup defined by input.php. A typical mail form would look like this:

  (:input start "http://domain.tld/path/to/pmwiki.php?action=mailform2":)
  ...
  (:input line mail-recipients:)
  ...
  (:input line mail-subject:)
  ...
  (:input text mail-text rows=10 cols=65:)
  ...
  (:input button "Send the mail!":)
  ...
  (:inputend:)

Notes

• The quotes around the script URL are mandatory. Without them, input.php would interpret it as a parameter named http://domain.tld/path/to/pmwiki.php?action with a value of mailform2, and carp about a missing script parameter.
• If you applied the CleanUrls recipe and have a redirect rule installed, make sure that the ?action=mailform2 URL above goes to the "unclean" URL (the one that contains pmwiki.php). Otherwise, form input data will be dropped by Apache, and all you'll get is seemingly empty input fields.
• Data from the input fields isn't automatically moved into the ?action=mailform2 script. You'll have to do that in config.php (see below; it's simple).

Using Mailform2 with newer versions of PmWiki

Since PmWiki 2.0.beta44, the (:input:) method of making forms has been a native part of PmWiki. You do not need to install the Input cookbook.

To use Mailform2 with these versions, simply comment out the line in mailform2.phpΔ which reads

  require_once('cookbook/input.php');

After you comment it out it should read

  // require_once('cookbook/input.php');

Controlling action=mailform2

The action handler expects the following variables, which must be set or filled from the form in config.php. See below for details on how to do this.

$Mailform2Recipient

$Mailform2Sender

$Mailform2Subject

$Mailform2Text

$Mailform2SuccessPage

$Mailform2FailurePage

$Mailform2Disabled

Defining the variables

These variables should be set up in config.php. Good ways to do that would be:

• Initialise with a fixed string, as in
  $Mailform2Recipient = 'webmaster@host.tld';

• Initialise from a POST variable. This is how you get the data input by the user. For example, if the name of your message text field were 'mail-text', you would fill $Mailform2Text as follows:
  $Mailform2Text = $_POST['mail-text'];

• Initialise from a session variable, as in
  session_start();
  $Mailform2SuccessPage = $_SESSION['SuccessPage'];
  session_write_close();

Some non-obvious ways to use this

Restricting to specific pages or groups

If you want to prevent casual visitors from setting up an input form, you can write-protect a group and limit the recipe's scope like this:

  if ($Group == 'PmWiki') {
    include_once('cookbook/mailform2.php');
  }

You can also restrict to a single page, like this:

  if ($FullName == 'PmWiki.Feedback') {
    include_once('cookbook/mailform2.php');
  }

Notes

• This recipe was last tested on PmWiki version: 2.0beta36
• This recipe requires at least PmWiki version 2.0beta25, and Input V0.92.
• Input won't work for PmWiki version 2.0beta44 or later; this means that Mailform2 won't work, too. If you have other means to generate HTML forms, you can make Mailform2 work by removing the require_once ('cookbook/mailform2.php'); line from input.php.

Clean URLs

This method of creating clean URLs -- http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/Cookbook/CleanUrls#samedir -- breaks Mailform2. Most of the time, instead of sending mail, the user is just redirected to the site's home page without confirmation or error. -- Neurophyre, 7 Aug 2006

Since MailForm does nothing particularly sneaky, I suspect that this is a bug in the rewrite rules given in that sub-recipe, and that it would break every other recipe that processes form data.
JoachimDurchholz January 05, 2007, at 12:52 PM

See Also

• EMailForm
• Captcha

Change and contribution history

Comments

See discussion at Mailform2-Talk?