PHP Form cannot be viewed by Customer

[dharrison]

Hi

I have a problem. I am in the process of updating my customer's form (can be found at the bottom of page: http://www.dvhdesign.co.uk/rf/contact.php ). I gave the link to my customer and he gets a 404 page not found error.

Is there something that I am doing wrong or is there a browser setting that is stopping him from seeing the page.

Any help will gratefully be recieved.

Best regards

[iowarth]

I'm afraid I have no idea as to the precise cause. Firstly I suggest you look for the obvious - i.e. does he have the link precisely correct? Was it truncated by his email client? Has he copied it correctly? You could put a test page up on his site and give him the link to that containing nothing but a link to the form page - see if he can access it then.
Having said this, a few months ago, shortly after the release of XP SP2, a number of people had the same problem with a form on one of my sites. In all cases it disappeared after either uninstalling SP2 (as several did due to other problems it generated) or after subsequent updates.
It could also be worth him checking his Internet Explorer.Tools.Internet Options security tab. If it is set on high this disables just about everything on the web!

[smbotans]

don't know if this will help ... the link you posted takes us directly to the contact form but the CONTACT FORM link at the top of the page points to http://www.dvhdesign.co.uk/rf/contact.html which does give an 404 error

may be this is what is happening? ie. you need to change the link from html to php

serge

[stevealmond]

The link that you have posted works great. However I wasn't sure from your post whether it was when the form had been completed and sent that the 404 error came up. So I duly completed all the fields and sent the form, receiving the page that says my message has been received and I will be dealt with shortly.

Great stuff, the page works perfectly, but I don't really want to have anyone contact me, it was only a test!

However the problem is on the contact page with the contact us link. The link is a html link rather than a php link.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Steve

[stevealmond]

Saying that I have just checked all of the links at the top of the page that you have posted. All of them return a 404 from the dvhdesign server. So I am now not sure that I am barking up the wrong tree!

Steve

[dharrison]

Hi Steve

Just in case this is the problem, I have changed it. Thanks man.

The other links won't work on my site as I have only uploaded that page rather than the entire website. The other links at this stage are irrelevent.

Thanks for your help.

Best regards

[kgun]

Other potential (future) problems?

Do you use secure fields by escaping special characters?

Do you put the content of the form in a MySQL database? If not, I suppose that you do that already now, so you can build up a customer database (CMS system).

It takes you a few hours to learn the basics of MySQL, hours that may be more than saved in the future.

[dharrison]

Not quite sure I follow kgun, do you mean learn PHP/MySQL to escape prevent future problems?

stevealmond, I spoke to my customer and you were right, he was clicking that link. Sorted.

Many thanks all of you for your help. I hope I can return the favour soon. :)

Best regards

[kgun]

Originally Posted by dharrison

Not quite sure I follow kgun, do you mean learn PHP/MySQL to escape prevent future problems?

No, I do not know how experienced you are to programming, but if I remember right, you wrote another place that you was new to PHP. Escaping special input (like special characters) is a well known problem in programming and has resulted in much headache. It is especially related to text strings. And it is getting worse if you combine PHP / MySQL.

KW magic quotes in php

If you use MySQL

KW SQL injection attacks

Relevant links:
Top 7 PHP Security Blunders

Write Secure Scripts with PHP 4.2!

Rule: Escape all data from external resources.

That means strip / modify input text etc. for potential problematic code (e.g. special characters).

I reccomended using MySQL to collect the user information in a database. That may be the start of your own content management system.

The top of laziness is to make it right from the start.

And if you use MySQL:

Each type of entity (or "thing") that you want to be able to store information about should be given its own table.

If you need to store multiple values in a single field, your design is probably flawed.

Source: Kevin Yank Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL

Excellent book, that shows how you can build your own CMS. It is not difficult.

P.S. I am quite new to PHP myself, but not to programming, and know how important it is to get it right from the start.

[dharrison]

Thanks for this kgun.

I am new to PHP, I have programmed for a few years.

[davebarnes]

A comment on the design of the form.

Remove the "Clear From" button.
No one ever really wants to do this.
The people who click on it will do so accidently and become very upset that they just nuked all their typing effort.

,dave

[dharrison]

Thanks David. I do this out of habit, one I really need to break.

[kgun]

And a question about colours?

Why do you use yellow and white in that way?

Did you mean?

* Required fields in yellow?

[icb01co2]

Form not working for me. 404 sorry.

[dharrison]

Thats because its no longer there I have officially released it to my customer's website.

Thanks anyway.

[dharrison]

Originally Posted by kgun

And a question about colours?

Why do you use yellow and white in that way?

Did you mean?

* Required fields in yellow?

I don't. Thats just your browser.

And anyway on my browser, only 2 fields come up in yellow and I have 4 more fields that are required. So if it is different in both cases then saying they are yellow will confuse users more.

Thanks for your observations anyway. They are most appreciated.