I have spent about a half hour searching this forum for replies on “contact form” and came to the conclusion that is about the most confusing issue with Freeway – even though having a website with a contact form is about as basic a functions as you can imagine.
Anyway…I need to set one up and cannot figure out where to start. I have actually downloaded the one that everyone seems to like — the one from “Tim” — but he references a site on some Softpress Reference Guide about how to set up the form itself on the page, and his link is outdated.
My website is hosted on GoDaddy.
I would be very grateful for any help on how to do that simply.
Welcome to a world of pain. If you look through the search results for
“I can’t get my form to work” 9 out of 10 are from GoDaddy hosting
customers. GD has some seriously quaint ideas about how to configure
their servers, and it leads to a lot of finger-pointing and
difficulty. The same site will work on one GD server and not on
another, etc.
To be fair, they do what they do because they are trying to cut down
on the amount of spam in the world. But they hit that fly with a large
sledgehammer and cause a lot of collateral damage.
If you contact Tim Plumb at FreewayActions.com he can help you. It’s
one of the features of his PHP Contact Form Action – designed to work
around some of the madness. But there are lots of other hosting
providers in the world, I can recommend some if you want to move from
GD.
Walter
On Mar 27, 2010, at 7:44 PM, SkipII wrote:
So…I’m with the wrong hosting company…or there some way to do it?
I am sure that in most cases GoDaddy hosted sites are fine and everything is good in the world.
But unfortunately as Walter has said there are better choices to be made and an easier life to be had when you want a contact form to work as it does on everyone else’s servers.
As I have said before I use GD for their domain registration services almost exclusively but not for hosting.
Hi SkipII,
It appears you are not alone attempting to get the PHP Feedback Form
action to work with GoDaddy. Just this week I’ve had four people
contact me about setting the action up with GD.
Hopefully this should give you some insight into the issues and what
you can do to get your feedback forms working on GoDaddy.
According to GoDaddy’s own documentation (GoDaddy Help Center | Customer Knowledge Base – GoDaddy Help Center
) every Linux account should come already set up with two form
processing scripts; webformmailer.php and gdform.php. Both of these
should do pretty much the same sort of thing - namely take your form
data and send it to an email address.
The current version of the action (http://www.freewayactions.com/product.php?id=019
) has an option called ‘Use GoDaddy’s mail script’ which when checked
will set the form on your page up to use the gdform.php file mentioned
above. I say should because sometimes it is missing and you will need
to contact Godaddy to ask them to install it. If you have an FTP
application (I recommend CyberDuck as it’s both free and very good - http://cyberduck.ch/)
log into your GoDaddy FTP account and check to see if the file is
there at the top level of your web space.
Once you’ve established the gdform.php file exists and you’ve checked
the ‘Use GoDaddy’s mail script’ option in the PHP Feedback Form action
you just need to supply the action a success page and email title. The
recipient email address is set via your GoDaddy control panel (see: http://help.godaddy.com/article/508)
.
Cross your fingers, upload your site and try the form out. It should
now work.
Here’s your checklist;
Are you using a Linux server?
Yes - you should be OK as long as you have access to PHP and SendMail
(most accounts are fine)
No, I think it’s a Windows server - stop there. The action will not
work.
Are you using GoDaddy?
Yes - a. Turn the ‘Use GoDaddy’s mail script’ option on and specify a
success page and email title in the action
b. Use GoDaddy’s control panel to set the recipient email address
for the form (http://help.godaddy.com/article/508)
c. If you get an error like “The requested URL /gdform.php was not
found on this server.” then FTP into your account to see if the file
‘gdform.php’ exists.
d. If the ‘gdform.php’ file is missing contact Godaddy and ask them
to install it. It should have been there from the beginning.
e. Once the file is in place (check by FTPing into your account
again) try the form again. It should now work.
No - a. Congratulate yourself for not using GoDaddy.
b. Turn the ‘Use GoDaddy’s mail script’ option off and specify an
error and success page, and email recipient in the actions palette
c. Upload and test the form. Most users find things work. Some
hosts, however, will make you jump through hoops and you may have to
specify a ‘trusted sender’ in the actions palette. Most of the time
the server just wants to make sure that the email account you are
sending the emails to actually is associated with the server and you
aren’t using them to spam thousands of people.
If any of the above looks like thorny mess then, it is! What was once
a quite simple action to handle form processing has turned into a
collection of bolted on tools that, if used correctly, should provide
your form data in an email.
Iim, you’re a genius. The problem is that I am not.
I’m more lost. I am not at all committed to GoDaddy. I am doing a simple site for my daughter’s book-selling business. If someone can suggest a better site, I would prefer that.
Goal is to have a simple contact form done for her site tomorrow.
Iim, you’re a genius. The problem is that I am not.
I’m more lost. I am not at all committed to GoDaddy. I am doing a
simple site for my daughter’s book-selling business. If someone can
suggest a better site, I would prefer that.
Goal is to have a simple contact form done for her site tomorrow.
I’d just like to add a little disclaimer for new users reading this post.
On 27 Mar 2010, at 23:26, SkipII wrote:
I have spent about a half hour searching this forum for replies on “contact form” and came to the conclusion that is about the most confusing issue with Freeway – even though having a website with a contact form is about as basic a functions as you can imagine.
This is a common misconception. It “seems” like it’s a basic function because so many people do it already, but it is by far more dependent on your web host than your HTML generator (Freeway). As you’re experiencing, all hosts do things differently; as a blind front end generator (we no way of knowing what your backend setup is, Windows server, Linux server and then the more specific settings that your hosts use) it’s impossible for us to create something that works for everybody.
Luckily, GoDaddy provide a service that will work for most people already, it’s just that they don’t really offer this information to customers readily. We’ll get a KnowledgeBase article up in the following week explaining how to go about getting forms working on GoDaddy hosting accounts, and perhaps update it for other hosts as needed.
