Using Forms

Forms are a great way to gather information from people visiting your web site.  You can include a simple form such as guest sign-in form or a more elaborate form such a registration or order form.  AOLPress makes form development  and design easy.  A program on frank called FormMail.pl parses the information input in the form and emails it to the specified recipient.  

The following form displays the various tools and options that you can use.

Please Evaluate My Web Page

Name:

Email:

I am:

I think your web page is:

Out of this World
Pretty Darn Good
About Average
In Need of Some Work
Pretty Pathetic

I think your page needs:

Additional Color
More Images
A Cooler Background
Better Links

Comments:

To get started on a form in AOLPress, select Forms under the Format menu.  First, you must select post as your method and enter the location of the form hander exactly as follows:

/cgi-bin/FormMail.pl

The form handler defines the form with the ACTION attribute defining the cgi-bin script (this is a program that was written by someone else and it will create a web response page for people who submit forms and then mail their responses to you) that will execute the incoming data and the METHOD defining that the incoming data will be stored so that it may be parsed one variable at a time.  To learn more about FormMail.pl, visit http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/formmail.shtml.

Next, you will see a dashed line on your document  (that defines the form area in your page) and a Forms Palette appear on the screen.
A Radio Button is a diamond-shaped or circular button. Several Radio Buttons can be grouped by giving all the buttons in the group the same "Form Tag". The group then acts like a single field in which only one button can be switched "on" at a time.
Check Boxes are similar to Radio Buttons, except they allow multiple values to be submitted with the same Form Tag.
The Text Field is a one-line box on the form where the user may type in text.
If you want to input more than one line of text you should use a Text Area rather than a Text Field.
You can insert a Selection List--either a scrollable list from which the user may select one or many items, or a pull-down list from which the user may select one item--into a form.
You can insert a "clickable" Image into a form. Clicking on the image immediately submits the form, sending the x and y position of the click.
The Reset button sets the other field elements to their initial state.
When clicked, the Submit button submits the current form to the form handler that was specified when the form was created.

Before designing your form, you should enter the following tag by selecting Show HTML from the Tools menu.  Put this tag immediately after the FORM tag.  Save the changes by clicking on the X in the upper right hand corner of the window and clicking on Apply.

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="recipient" VALUE="youracct@mtsu.edu">

This tag lets the FormMail.pl CGI script know where to mail the completed forms. Be sure to put YOUR e-mail address as the VALUE.

Now you are ready to design your form using the tools in the Forms Palette.  For more assistance with Creating Forms in AOLPress, see the AOLPress tutorial at http://www.aolpress.com/press/2.0/usrguide/.

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