Hey guys, I'm workin on a site and I'm definitely gonna need to have forms on it. How do I receive the form results. What are the available options and how can I use them. Any link to articles, eBooks or other reference stuffs in addition to your opinions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks a Lot...!

There is no way that question can be answered in one short post. There are many options available; Perl, CGI, VB.Net, Java, C++, Ruby, PHP, ASP, you name it. It sort of depends on what you want to do with the form results. Do you know any programming languages? (CSS and HTML are not programming languages)

As far as the mechanics behind it, the form sends data to the server. An application of the server gets the data and does something with it. That's it.

Dont know any programming languages yet, still working on mastering them. What would be the cheapest and shortest way to do that from within FrontPage. Something like adding some Codes to my site or whateva. Just Suggestions...

You can't. FrontPage is a tool for designing web pages.


You can't just add some codes to the website, because the website wouldn't know what to do with the code. Just grabbing a random example off the web, you would start out with an HTML forms something like this:


When the form is filled in and the user hits the submit button, the information in the form is sent back to the server. In this case, it is sending the information to a file called 'process.php'. The .php file looks like this:


The .php script then gets the information from the form, and stores it in the form of a couple of variables. Presumably at this point, another .php application would take that information and do something with it, such as add the information to a shopping cart, or something else.

In order for this set up to work, the server needs to be able to run .php.



I asked you what you were trying to accomplish, so that we could give you sensible suggestions. We also have no idea what sort of setup your web hosting service has, so it is a bit pointless to make any suggestions without knowing that also.

Hey thanks for your help so far. What I'm thinking of having is more or less a feedback form where users can drop comments and subscribe to some form of newslettters that I'd be sending periodically. I'm thinking there's a way one can set up the forms such that the results are delivered to an email address, something similar to what Yahoo! calls email forms. I'd have used Yahoo!'s feature but for the fact that after clicking the submit button, what you see is something like this: The following Form results have been sent and you'll see everything you filled out in the form, now that's not professional at all. If there was a way of linking the submittion process to a thank you page such that the results are sent to the specified email address without showing the results, instead showing something like Thank You for your interest in ... We have received your entry and will contact you shortly, I will definitely stick to email forms. I hope this greatly describes my intentions and is not too lenghty. Thanks a lot.

Actually, that is completely professional. It allows the user to verify that they entered their information correctly, and is an industry standard on everything from e-commerce web sites to forum sign-ups.

Regardless, all you need to do is have the information emailed to you (which has been discussed here before), and have it load a thank-you page once the email has been submitted. Try this example:
http://www.chami.com/tips/Internet/010597I.html

That is the best that you are going to be able to do without using some server-side technology.

Hey thanks Pal, got some useful stuff from that page. But I dont think they specified how to make the thank you page load as soon as the results are sent. One more thing, since you said having the form results displayed is professional, I'm thinking of sticking to it. The problem with that page is that it is completely blank with only the form results displayed in text form, no colours, formatting or whatever; infact one might think he/she has been redirected from the site. Is there a way of making the results page load with the actual formatting of the site, what I mean is having the ..."The following form results has been sent..." displayed with the actual formatting of the site (Home, about us etc buttons intact). If you dont get the picture let's just see how we can make the thank you page load in addition to having the results emailed to me. Thanks once again for your help pal, I owe you one!!!