Guide to FormMail

This guide will instruct you on how to insert a mail form into your page, so users may send you a message directly from your web site. This tutorial is written for use with Front Page 2000. The tutorial may still be helpful for users of other editors (Front Page 98, Dreamweaver, etc) because all the programs are some what similar.

Putting a Basic Form in Your Page:

To save you some time, we have created a very basic form, you will uses this form as a the base for your form. So first you must download our basic form. To do this you need to save the following link to you computer. Please use the following directions to do this:

Internet Explorer users:
Right click on the link, in the menu that appears choose "Save Target As". Save the file to somewhere you can remember to you your computer.

Netscape Users:
Right click on the link, in the menu that appears choose "Save Link As". Save the file to somewhere you can remember to you your computer.

Download Basic Form

Now open the file you just downloaded in FrontPage.  It should contain a basic form for you to start.

Adding and Editing Your Fields

Now if the basic four fields already provided in the template are all you needed you can move on to the next steps, but odds are you probably need more fields then that.

First of all if you don't need some of fields provided for you, just select them, and hit the delete key, like you would remove any other object.

The whole form is surrounded by a dashed line.  When you add any new fields, they must be added somewhere within this box.

Now to add a new text field follow these steps.

1. Place the cursor where you want the field.
   
   Go to the Insert menu.
   
   Go to Form (if there is no Form option, click the double arrows at the bottom).  A second menu will popup, with all the different form objects.  Select "One-Line Text Box".
   
   
   
    
   The textbox object should now be on your page.
   
   Now select the new textbox and right click on it.
   
   In the menu that pops up, select "Form Field Properties".
   
   
   
     In the new window that opens, go to the fields called Name.  Change this to name of your field.  Make sure the name is something that makes sense.  When you get you form mail the information is displayed with just this name and the data the user enters.  Also note the name cannot be the same as any other names of fields.
   
   
   
   
   If you want to change the width of the field, change the number in the "Width in Characters" section.  Then hit OK.
   
   
2. Now type in a label next to you new field and your all set.  To insert a multi-lined textbox, follow the exact same steps, except just select "Scrolling Text Box" from the Insert menu.  Just repeat the process for each new field you wish to add.

Adding More Form Fields

If necessary, you may proceed to add more advanced form fields in you form such as drop-down menus and check boxes.  Please visit the tutorial on how to add more advanced form fields or simply view a sample advanced form.

Configuring the Form

Now that you have all the fields in your form, we need to set it up for your page.

Right click somewhere in the form (The form is has a dashed black line as its outline).  A menu will come up, select "Form Properties" from the menu.

A new window will open up. In this new window click on the Advanced Button. This will bring up another new window.

On the Left hand side select the line that says "recipient". The click the "Modify" button on the right. A new window will pop-up with two text fields, one that's labeled "Name" and other "Value". Change the Value field to be the email address of where you want the forms to be mailed to. Then click "Ok".

Now select "redirect" form the left and click modify. Redirect refers to the web page the user will be taken to after they submit the form. You may wish to make a special page that tells them that their form has been successfully submitted. If so, please put the full web address of page. Make sure when you later create the page the name is exactly the same. If you don't want a special pages just put the address of the page you want them to go to (such as your home page). Once this is entered hit "Ok".

The last section on the left hand side is "Required". This sets which fields the user must enter to successfully submit the form. In this field enter the names of the fields separated by commas you want to make required.  For instance of you wanted the name and email address to be required you would change the value field to "email, realname".   If you don't remember the names of your fields you can look them up by selecting the field and going to the the "Form Field Properties" option.

Click "Ok" on the next two windows to get back to editing your page.

Register Your Email Address with the University Webmaster

Attention: Users who wish to receive mail from this script must register their email addresses with the University Webmaster before they will be able to receive email from the script.  Those who register should be aware of the potential of receiving anonymous email and SPAM via the FormMail script.  Keep in mind, the FormMail script restricts users to submit less than 255 characters in its form textbox field. If users submit data exceeding the maximum allowed length of characters, you'll receive "Max Length Exceeded" error message in your email confirmation. The form result submitted in the textbox field by the user will NOT be delivered. We recommend you use FormMail ONLY for forms that solicit simple and short responses.

If you are having problems with an existing form or are setting up a new FormMail page with a new email recipient, please register your email address below:

Register E-Mail:

Once you register your email,  you will be able to test and use your form.

 

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