I need help! I need to send some forms and emails etc from a website made Dreamweaver 8, but don't have a clue how to do it. I can't find any help on the web for absolute beginners. Please help!!!

Erica,

Dreamweaver is a great application, but, that comes at a price <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile_sad.gif border=0 align=middle>

it does need a lot of work to learn it and apply what you learn, go to the adobe site for a start and have a look around there for starter tutorials. There are also starter tutorials that come with DW.

Maybe my question wasn't clear. I know how to use Dreamweaver, and have built a few sites with it. Now I need to use forms using PHP, and have no idea how to do that. Dreamweaver doesn't give any real step by step information on PHP, and the tutorials I'v found so far for PHP don't intergrate with Dreamweaver 8.

So what I'm asking is if anyone knows of any practicle tutorials which explains PHP for Dreamweaver 8 specifically.

Cheers

I'm quite interested in this too if anyone knows of a good (Dummys) guide.
Thanks.

sorry for the confusion . . .

my experience with forms has all been self-taught, I used "DreamweaverMX 2004 with asp, coldfusion and php by Jeffrey Bardell" ISBN 0-321-24157-6 as my intro to php with DW. It has a lenthy tutorial that inculdes forms, my view was that it took you through all the process of putting php and forms in, but you were really just following instructions, I didn't feel that I really learned what I needed.

From that I picked apart the php that DW produced for a simple form and looked at how it put things into the database. My other book that I feel really tought me what I needed was "Web database applications with php & mysql", 0-596-00041-3 from o'reilly, there's not a lot in there about forms but lots of other good stuff.

Some general things though, I used DW to generate a contact form on a site, it took user input then assembled an email and sent it to the site owner. It was found by various people and used for sending spam, it appears that you can add extra things to the email address that get interpreted by the email sender, my customer was getting a lot of blank email until I modified the code by hand. I don't think DW has added anything special in the way of checking either. Here's an example, I've generated a form for name and address collection and storage into a database table all in DW. It works fine, but there is no validation on the inputs, so . . . if someone puts html tags into the fields they get stored and when the details are retreived so are the tags, then they get into the next page.

That means you have to do lots of validation if you want clean data, in fact I do it twice, once on the client page with javascript, checking things like string length, then I do it all again on the server. It's a lot of messing about but if the bad people can do something with your forms then they will, we just have to be one step ahead, expect them and make sure that whatever they put into the form the code deals with it.

Sorry I can't be a lot of help apart from that.

Hi Erica,

Unfortunatelly Dreamweaver does not do everything and, as Allan is saying, you will need to learn how to code in php to get the things properly. I just made a quick search on google and I found this:

www.thesitewizard.com/archive/feedbackphp.shtml

Starts from the very begging. Hope this help


Marcell M C Branco