Hello, I’m new to Freeway and have just bought FreewayPro 5, having used the trial version for a few days. In that time I’ve been able to build a new website (what a fabulous bit of software!), but I’m having problems getting the PHP feedback form to work. I’ve followed the ‘Creating a Contact Form in Freeway’ instructions posted at the KnowledgeBase to the letter, I think, but when I uploaded my site and tried to use the contact form, as soon as I pressed the ‘submit’ button I got a page of code which I didn’t understand. The contact page is at:
I’d appreciate any help or advice. My ISP states that it supports PHP 5.
It might be worth checking that the account you have has PHP as one of
the options, even though your hosting company supports it might not
mean that your account has it available, contact them and tell them
what’s happening.
HTH
On Feb 9, 2010, at 2:04 AM, Gerry wrote:
Hello, I’m new to Freeway and have just bought FreewayPro 5, having
used the trial version for a few days. In that time I’ve been able
to build a new website (what a fabulous bit of software!), but I’m
having problems getting the PHP feedback form to work. I’ve followed
the ‘Creating a Contact Form in Freeway’ instructions posted at the
KnowledgeBase to the letter, I think, but when I uploaded my site
and tried to use the contact form, as soon as I pressed the ‘submit’
button I got a page of code which I didn’t understand. The contact
page is at:
Thanks for this Mike. I’ve just checked: under the question ‘What version of PHP can I use on my 123-reg hosting account?’ it replies:
"All 123-reg Linux shared hosting packages are compatible with PHP 5.
The most accurate and detailed information regarding the configuration of PHP on your server can be obtained by running a PHP script on your account containing the phpinfo command. Paste the following code into a file with the extension .php, upload it to your account and view it in your web browser."
It then gives a small bit of code. To be frank, I don’t have the faintest idea what this means, or even what it would show me!
Create a text file called something like info.php that contains the
following:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
(Without the tildes)
then upload this to your home directory and load the address http://
YOUR_DOMAIN/info.php in a browser, it should load with information
about php on your account.
If you do this then remove the file afterwards, if it just shows the
same text in your browser then it is not geting parsed.
This would tell you if PHP is running on your account but to be honest
if the php code os not getting parsed it is probably because php in
not available to your account.
The people you need to talk to are your hosting people.
HTH
On Feb 9, 2010, at 2:42 AM, Gerry wrote:
Thanks for this Mike. I’ve just checked: under the question ‘What
version of PHP can I use on my 123-reg hosting account?’ it replies:
"All 123-reg Linux shared hosting packages are compatible with PHP 5.
The most accurate and detailed information regarding the
configuration of PHP on your server can be obtained by running a PHP
script on your account containing the phpinfo command. Paste the
following code into a file with the extension .php, upload it to
your account and view it in your web browser."
It then gives a small bit of code. To be frank, I don’t have the
faintest idea what this means, or even what it would show me!
Thanks for this. I’ve just tried this with the bit of code they advised and viewed it in my browser; it just shows the same bit of code. So I guess that means PHP is not running on my account. I’ve posted a request for clarification on my host’s support forum and await a response. I also noticed when I looked at my home folder that my thanks and error pages had an extra ‘html’ extension on each. Not sure how that happened. Anyway, I deleted the extras thinking that might be something to do with it; but no, it’s not.
Many thanks for your help on this. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I guess that means PHP is not running on my account.
That’s the only reason I can think of for that.
PHP is no longer a premium feature in most web hosting accounts - and
it shouldn’t be a premium anywhere. If you’re going to be charged
extra, consider switching to a different host.
Yes, it’s now working fine! I had to upgrade my account, though, which cost me an extra thirty quid. Many thanks to you all for the invaluable feedback here – it’s been fantastic.
David, I’m not entirely sure how to make the form look prettier, but I’ll have a go. One interesting thing – I’m not sure how this happened, but on the live website, the message rectangle on the form can be extended by clicking and dragging on the bottom right hand corner; in fact the whole form can be made bigger. This increases the space for the message and is a bit of inadvertent interactivity I quite like. 8–) Take a look at:
I have to say Freeway is remarkable. I only started using it for the first time last Thursday and already I’ve been able to build this website – with very little web design experience, bar a bit of html coding to update my own website occasionally. I’m very impressed.
One interesting thing — I’m not sure how this happened, but on the live website, the message rectangle on the form can be extended by clicking and dragging on the bottom right hand corner
This is a Safari thing - clever that Safari!
not entirely sure how to make the form look prettier
Start by making your table cells just a little taller than your input fields, centre the text vertically in the cells, reduce the width of the descriptor columns to close the gap between them and the input fields column.
And your note about dragging the message box to make it bigger wont work on most browsers so better to leave that out or it will confuse your visitors.
If they are putting a lot of text in then normal browser behaviour is to add a scroll bar.
You probably want your name and email fields to be a bit longer to accommodate all of a long name or email address. You can set this in the inspector - with the field selected go to the third tab in the inspector and set the size there to however many characters you want people to see.
Many thanks for this. After a bit of footering about I’ve been able to do this. The form looks much much neater – I appreciate your telling me how to get there with it. It doesn’t look quite as good in Firefox, tho – each of the fields seem to lose their left edge and their bottom edge. I can’t see what can be done about that.
As there is a thread already existing regarding problems with the PHP feedback form, I may as well carry on here considering the original issue is fixed.
Are there issues with 2.3.3 of this Action? I originally installed and tested the form page, and everything was fine, but my client has just informed me that although they are receiving the requests, the visitor is now presented with a server error page, and do not realise that their request has gone through.
I was using a much earlier version of this action prior to updating, and I don’t believe this was an issue, and the only change is me updating to 2.3.3. The odd thing is, earlier today when I first went in to see what was wrong, I added my email address in to test it, and it started working OK, so I put the clients email address back in and the server error occurs - and that now also happens for my email address, too.
I also need to add that if I have “Missing email address options” set up as noreply@[domain] the From column for emails shows as <> <> whereas in original testing it had email@hidden (the correct domain).
If type in a “Specific e-mail address…” I still get the server error, but the message shows as from email@hidden (the correct domain).
As there is a thread already existing regarding problems with the PHP feedback form, I may as well carry on here considering the original issue is fixed.
Yes but strictly speaking it wasn’t a problem with the action but rather a problem with the hosting!
As far as I am aware the current version 2.3.3 is absolutely fine.
The question I would ask is if something has changed at the server side of things.
I assume that you have it set for separate error pages.
Yes, I realise it was the hosting at fault for the original post, but I didn’t want to piggy back on a thread that was still in progress that is all.
It seems that using the Upload command in Freeway doesn’t sit well with the action, and it wasn’t until I manually copied the generated .php files that the problem went away.
It seems that using the Upload command in Freeway doesn’t sit well with the action, and it wasn’t until I manually copied the generated .php files that the problem went away.
What do you mean exactly.
I have only ever used FW’s own upload for a PHPFF action generated -go.php file and have never had any problems with it.
It is more likely that you have some strange server setting that might be causing this - the other thing to try is toggling the Passive upload setting. ie if it is on then turn it off and vice-versa.
Otherwise you will always have to remember to manually upload.