Matt Varone - Creative Designer

— 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: 1.1.2 4/20/09

These are a couple of it’s main features ( ver. 1.1.2 ):

* 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 1.1.2 )
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.

› Continue reading

— As soon as you drop tables you find that making nicely formated and accessible forms is not that simple. There are many discussed methods to achieve this and there will always be something to argue about them. Having said that I present you here with a solution that in most of the cases works for me. I hope you find this useful.

GOALS:

There were a couple of things I had in mind when creating this form, first of all the code would have to be valid XHTML, clean semantic and well formated. This would need to have a good balance between accessibility and flexibility to make it portable and easy to style. This way you have more chances to easily copy and modify to adjust to different needs.
› Continue reading

— This web tool will help you generate the code you need to build a navigation bar with the technique described in this article: CSS Text based navigation bar with images.

The result is a valid and accessible text based imaged navigation bar with one sprite image, XHTML and CSS. I have included a short video as well to showcase the process.

Please let me know if you have any comment. You can download the generated code in a zip file.

Hope you find it useful. Enjoy!