I have built this site which is dual language and makes use ofeasiForm for two room-reservation pages. It is hosted with Amen who insisted we use a virtual private server in order for an SSL to work on the pages with the rerservation forms. Getting the ioncube required by easiFornm on to this server plus the SSL baffled me, being new to me and in French as well. Help cam from someone who knows about these things, (JSG) and in double quick time the ioncube and SSL was installed and the site is live.
JSG, my local and wonderful web master has also made some useful changes to the forms - translated the English error messages for example and removed part of the bank card number from the message that goes back to the form user to confirm what he or she has sent. This was performed outside of Freeway on a PC using a text editor. Which means every time I upload a modification from Freeway it overwrites his useful work. Is there an easy solution to this? He suggested I download the modified site back into freeway but, as far as I know, this is not possible. JSG was not of course aware of FW being a coder and works on a PC. As Mike Brackenridge of easiForm says I can copy the modified scripts/pages and upload them independently after each time I have uploaded from FW. But can these 2 pages be quarantined on the server and remain untouched by anything I do? (as a sub-domain?) The site is also visible on http://www.lamaisondelucie.fr And it is only on the .fr site that the SSL pages are accessed. Can this be exploited?
I will of course be presenting this dilemma to JSG tomorrow but we would be interested to know someone else’s take on this. T
This is one of the first unpleasant lessons I learned with Freeway,
and in many ways it catapulted me into the world of learning to code,
just to get me out of this particular trap.
There are two good solutions possible here, and a few less good ones.
I’m not at all familiar with how EasiForm goes about its business, so
I will have to speak in the theoretical here, but maybe you can work
with Mike (the author of the Action) or your local PC-wielding hero to
accomplish these in practice.
Extract your changes to an include file, and use the Freeway HTML
Markup tools to insert that include after the Action-generated code.
This would be a good fit for your language changes, because your
include could maintain a simple 1:1 map between old and new language
in an array, and use str_replace() on the generated output to replace
one with the other.
Modify the Action to generate the desired code. This is actually a
lot easier than it sounds, Actions are written primarily in
JavaScript, with some XML and Freeway-centric stuff thrown in for
flavor. An experienced programmer can usually grasp the working method
in a short while, and since many Actions are distributed in an open
format (all of mine are BSD-licensed, except where other factors force
otherwise) they are available for study and re-use.
You can try to maintain your changes manually, perhaps saving a marked-
up version under another filename, like myformpage.php.bak, which
Freeway will not overwrite, and then merge the changes by hand after
you publish.
If you want to go down this road, then I recommend BBEdit from http://barebones.com
as a really great investment. It includes a powerful “Find
Differences” command that I have used for this very purpose for many
years. You target two different files, and BBEdit will highlight the
places where those two files differ. (The free TextWrangler version
also does this, but I’ve never used it for that – not sure where the
two applications differ in that regard.) You will be able to skip over
the differences that are merely the layout, and concentrate on the
differences that pertain to your custom code. One click on an arrow
button will send changes from one file to the other.
Walter
On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:47 AM, Richard Lowther wrote:
I, or rather we, are working on it. Mike is also independantly working on a French version of his easiForm action so one way or another we should sort this out.
For this site I will explore one of your suggestions (and learn code)