[pmwiki-users] mailform variant 4?

The Editor editor at fast.st
Fri Apr 27 08:32:07 CDT 2007


On 4/27/07, Tegan Dowling <tmdowling at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ick.  Is this on anyone's radar to tackle?  Some in the user community
> *must* have solved it for themselves, and just not shared, right?  I'm
> guessing that this feature is missing because it's more of a CMS need than
> something that would be used by a regular wiki?
>
> From a lay perspective, this doesn't look as if it should be that hard to do
> -- it seems as if all the pieces have been developed, and that it's just
> that no one's put them together in one place.  I need to
> * use the Input recipe's syntax to create a form on a page (no problem),
> * add that "captcha-like" thinger from CommentBoxPlus (or somewhere) to
> verify the user is human (couldn't/shouldn't this be added to the Input
> recipe, anyhow?),
> * have some of the fields in the form on the page be standard email fields,
> and
> * have the "Submit" button send an email to an address that I hard-code into
> the form, or the recipe configuration, or (best) that the form's author
> pre-enters in an Input field that is "hidden".
>
> Of the existing MailForm recipes, Mailform2
> (http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Mailform2) seems to
> come closest to this, but I can't for the life of me figure out how it
> works.
> * There's a field "$Mailform2Sender", but the description for it says it's
> "The Sender: header to attach to the message. Note that this value is
> ignored except for installations on Windows." - So I infer that, for a wiki
> installed on a linux server, this is useless, and won't show up as the
> "From" field in the email?
> * And then there's the field "$Mailform2Subject"; I can't see how the
> contents of it get inserted into the "Subject" field of the email.  Since I
> can't figure that out, I can't see how to add other Input fields that I
> might want to use on the page.
> * And I don't have a chance of figuring out how to add a Captcha-like thing.
>
> So after 10 hours of experimenting with the PmWiki MailForm recipes, I'm now
> looking at www.Wufoo.com - they have a pretty nifty utility that lets you
> build a form (even lets you get at the css of it if you want), plug the
> resulting html into a page, and store the messages it sends on their
> servers, where you can read them, add comments to them, and look at
> statistics and reports on them.  They offer a wufoo-branded, 10-field,
> 3-form account for free, and un-branded, larger accounts for fees that start
> at $9/month.  Does anyone know of any alternatives?

ZAP does all of this quite easily with a plus: the email address is
hidden in session variables so it's not visible in the html source
like it would be in a hidden field.  You can even do things like
preschedule emails, mail lists, templated with field insertions,
etc.--not to mention it can be combined in interesting ways with all
the other features in ZAP. Works fine as far as I can tell.  See the
sample snippets at ZAPsite for a demo.

Remember too, if there are extra features you don't want in ZAP it has
a very modular design, and it would be easy to cut out stuff you don't
want.  I wouldn't want to maintain a separate ZAPmail script but
making one would be MUCH easier than drawing up one from scratch.
(Let me know if you would like pointers.  I probably should put up a
tutorial on this at ZAPsite).

Cheers,
Dan



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