Matt Varone - Creative Developer

— I found that more than often clients generate a lot of garbage html in the post content with things like divs, p , a, etc. tags which haven’t been closed or opened properly. This makes the website fail to validate against W3C standards which in between other things, could potentially affect the site’s ranking and its accessibility. Of course asking clients to switch to the HTML view to clean the content is out of the question, so a solution is needed, and been that this could happen to any site makes it something that we should take in count upfront when building a professional website.

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— Inspired by the great idea of David Walsh’s jQuery topLink Plugin, I made a similar plugin but with two key differences, this one does not require you to add extra html markup or extra plugins to function. It will only work when JavaScript is turned on ( on purpose ), It’s easy to setup with only one line of code, and it works cross-browser nicely ( Tested: IE6-8, FF, Safari ). Optionally it can benefit from the jQuery Easing plugin with a different easing animation for the page scrolling.

— It’s been a while, but today I am releasing a new version of my contact form script, this time under the name SimpleForm. It’s a nicer version of the previous one, re-written from the ground up and with a couple of new features. SimpleForm is basically meant to be an easy solution to handle one or many forms with little effort. It’s mainly focused on ease of use and rapid deployment.

Current version: 1.1.4 7/31/09

These are a couple of it’s main features ( ver. 1.1.4 ):

* Multiform handler.
* Support for required fields.
* PHP email validation.
* Unobtrusive JavaScript function to pre-check form data ( 4KB file ).
* Lightweight, easy to use.
* Multilingual support.
* External configuration file that can reside outside the public folder.

HOW DOES IT WORKS?

It’s very simple, first there is a configuration file where you define all of your website forms, by this I mean form title, form fields, form required fields and the location of each form. Then there are some snippets you have to add to your form page/s and thats all. SimpleForm takes care of pre-cheking the form fields with JS and then validating them with PHP, if it’s valid then it will send the email to the configured email address and return the user to the form page with a success message or otherwise, with an error message.

INSTALLING THE SCRIPT

These are the necessary steps to have it up and running ( requires PHP 5 ):

1. Download SimpleForm ( ver 1.1.4 )
2. Open sf-config.php and edit the necessary info.
3. Upload sf-config.php to your host ( preferably outside the public folder ).
4. Open simpleform.php and edit the variable $PATH_TO_CONFIG_FILE ( on line 24 ) with the path from simpleform.php to sf-config.php ( leave empty if it resides on the same folder ).
5. Upload simpleform.php, simpleform.css and checkform.mini.js inside your public folder.
6. Open your form page/s and add the necessary code snippets.

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