Creating fillable forms are an advanced aspect of MS Word, but it’s a skill you would do well to master; especially if you routinely gather data or feedback from a target audience. So, here’s the not too difficult approach as demonstrated on MS Word 2010.

It all starts with a plan

Any design project starts with a thought and then takes the shape of a definite plan. Best thing you can do is to design it first on paper. To illustrate how to create a fillable form in Word 2010, here’s a basic feedback form for MakeUseOf.com readers.

The Developer Tab is the control center for forms

The Developer tab is hidden in the Ribbon. Reveal it by going to File – Options ­- Customize Ribbon. Under the long list of main tabs, select the checkbox for Developer.

The Developer tab gets a place on the Ribbon.

Adding Content Controls

Content controls are interactive elements that help you design documents and templates quickly. Available since Word 2007, there home is on the Developer tab. Every content control has properties which can be set for user input and data collection. We start adding a few as building blocks for our form.

Type in the details that you want the recipients to fill out – like Name, Gender, Age, Country, Operating System…and a few more.

Now, the form will be embellished with a few content controls against the details we have filled out. Go to the Developer tab – insert the cursor where you want the control to appear. Under the Controls group, you can see that there are nine options to choose from depending on the user input you want. For instance, Name needs a Plain Text Control as a fillable data field. Gender could do with checkboxes for male and female. Similarly, you can insert the appropriate content controls at the right places.

To configure the properties of the form control, click on Properties in the Controls group. The Control Content Properties dialog box will appear when called for each type of form control. Select or enter the desired properties.

For instance, for the Text Form field for comments, you can restrict the length or keep it limited with the options in Properties.

For dropdowns, you can add individual items easily from its Properties dialog.

Finalizing the form by restricting unintentional editing

Another basic feature you can enforce for form input is to control formatting and editing of form content.

Click on the form control and then select Restrict Editing from the Protect group. Options open up in a sidebar. Under Editing Restrictions select – Allow only this type of editing in the document. Select Filling in forms. Now, click on – Yes, start enforcing protection.

This step limits user input to the form controls only and not to the surrounding text.

A pop-up box opens up for setting up password protection. If you do not want to password protect the document click on OK to exit the dialog. Try out the form by filling in some sample data. To get back into the design mode, stop the protection by clicking on the button and then click on Design Mode in the Control Group.

This is a form at its simplest. Formatting and designing with Word’s other tools can turn even this simple form into a powerful document for data exchange. Let us know if this tutorial has served to illustrate the primary steps to create a fillable Microsoft Word 2010 form.

Sticky Password is a handy anti-theft device, but how exactly does it give you the cushion of security? Let’s walk through the software.

Open Sesame with a Master Password

Sticky Password Pro is a 7.8 MB download. The installation takes you through four steps starting with the setup of a master password. This is the only password which you have to remember. A Virtual Keyboard also allows passwords to be entered without pressing keys on the keyboard. The next three steps ask you to setup an authorization method (how you will unlock and access the database); a locking timeout (the auto-lock after x minutes of inactivity); and select the browser extensions that you would like to install.

The authorization method deserves a special mention because it allows you to be flexible and gives the option of using a Bluetooth device or a USB drive to decrypt and unlock the password database. All these options make for a strong first line of defense.

Store Your Personal Data Securely

Sticky Password is not only about storing your usernames and passwords, but the software also manages personal details like addresses and contact numbers as Identities. Also, Secure Memos can be filled up with extra information like passport data, various licenses, or the details of your software licenses and Internet settings, and more. It moves beyond a password management app into the realms of information management.

Putting Sticky Password to the Test

From the system tray, Sticky Password automatically recognizes when an application or a website is launched. If an account is found, the login data is entered and you are logged in automatically. If there is no account in the database, Sticky Password automatically hints at adding an account to the database. You can also use the Sticky Pointer to quickly select an application / website and enter personal data. Sticky Password allows multiple user names-password combos to be saved for one account. It allows for unlimited accounts and you can conveniently group them too.Quiet handy for all your Google accounts.

The auto-fill features of the software also includes other identity details like full name, sex, country, town/city, phone number, email address, etc. You can set up different identity profiles for your online shopping.That’s a real timesaver!

Noteworthy Extras

With a single click you can create a portable version of the app to carry along in your portable device. If you are a flummoxed, Sticky Password helps to create super-strong passwords with an included password generator.

To round it all off, Sticky Password has password import, secure encrypted export and backup functions to give you complete peace of mind. Is there anything else you can ask from a foolproof password management software? Stay safe.

We’ve got 25 copies of Sticky Password Pro to give away this week and here’s what you need to know to win one.

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions.

Step 1: Fill in the giveaway form

Please fill in the form with your real name and email address so that we can get in touch if you are chosen as a winner. Click here if you can’t view the form.

The giveaway code required to activate the form is available from Friday’s newsletter or on our Facebook page.

Step 2: Share!

You’re almost done. Now, all that’s left to do is to share the post. There are 2 options to choose from or you can do both!

This giveaway begins now and ends Friday, July 1st at 2100hrs PDT. The winners will be selected at random and informed via email.

Spread the word to your friends and have fun!

MakeUseOf would like to thank Sticky Password for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

But if you use a different password for every website, how will you ever be able to remember them all? You won’t, of course, and that’s where a password manager comes in. With a password manager, you only need to remember one “master password”, protecting all other unique passwords. KeePass and LastPass users are nodding their heads knowingly at this point, but if you’ve never used a password manager before and the concept seems a bit intimidating, it’s very possible RoboForm is what you’ve been waiting for all along.

First off, you should know RoboForm isn’t free: it currently costs $9.95 for the first year, and $19.95 for every year after that. For that, you get to install RoboForm on unlimited devices, with seamless password sync and backup. RoboForm also offers a free version, but it supports only ten logins (I know people who can keep ten different logins in their head). Fortunately, the full version comes with a 30-day trial, which is plenty of time to make up your mind. RoboForm’s commercial polish shows right from the first step on the installation process:

The installer is clear and simple, while not skimping on the details. Since you’re going to be trusting the database with all of your passwords, RoboForm lets you know right from the get-go where it would be stored, and you can change its location if you want to:

Then, right within the setup process, RoboForm has you create your new master password, the one you really must never forget. The dialog is very clear, and includes a password-strength meter. The meter, incidentally, hit the “Excellent” grade when I was less than halfway through typing my complete passphrase. This could either mean RoboForm’s standards for master password strength isn’t high enough, or I’m paranoid. I leave that judgment up to you.

RoboForm integrates tightly with IE, Firefox, Chrome and a host of other browsers. Here’s what the included Chrome add-on looks like:

This is what RoboForm’s main window looks like:

If you come from KeePass (like I do), you might be flustered at first by the fact that there’s no “New Record” button. If you want to save a new user/password pair using the RoboForm editor, it’s not instantly clear what you have to do. It turns out the secret is pushing the large RoboForm button:

So rather than a simple “New Record“, there are three different terms here — Safenote, Identity and Passcard. A Safenote is basically an encrypted note, completely free-form. That’s parallel to KeePass’s Notes field included with every record, but shinier:

An Identity is a complete profile used by RoboForm to automatically fill in forms. It has just about every field you could think of, starting from the obvious Name and Title and ending with obscure fields such as Pager number and NI and NHS numbers:

That’s just for “Person“. There are several other field sets, such as “Bank Account”, “Passport”, “Car” and more.

Last but not least, we’ve got Passcards, which are username/login pairs for websites, the most common used for a password manager. Surprisingly, you cannot create those from within RoboForm Editor. Here’s what I got when I tried:

Okay, so I used Chrome to go to a random website and signed up for a new account. When the time came to select a password, I decided to try RoboForm’s Generate feature:

That’s RoboForm’s Chrome add-on in the foreground, with the site I was trying to create an account with in the background. That Fill button just didn’t work. I clicked it with all my might, repeatedly, yet the Password and Repeat Password fields remained blank. Dragging the generated password did work, but it instantly closed the dialog, so for the Repeat Password I had to open the dialog again and drag it again. Copy/pasting would have been faster.

As soon as I hit the Create Account button, RoboForm’s auto-detection kicked in:

Quite slick! It had the real site name in the box, not “Random Website”. Not the URL either, mind you, but the actual site name, and it was clever enough to extract it even though the page title wasn’t the exact site name. Very nice. So on the one hand, letting you create new passcards only by actually creating new accounts in websites feels a bit restrictive — but on the other hand, it’s a fantastic way to make sure you never forget to store your new password.

The actual passcard record is very simple: It contains just a site title, URL, user ID and password:

And just for comparison, here’s the same dialog in KeePass:

A different level of visual complexity, indeed. And yes, if you’ve been paying attention you now know my fictitious identity at Popling.net, password and all. Go have fun, pretend you’re me.

If you’re already using another password management solution and wish to migrate to RoboForm, it’s very likely possible. Check out the comprehensive Import dialog:

Note that RoboForm also offers to import bookmarks. I had it import my IE bookmarks, and the process was very smooth. I ended up with a bookmark tree looking like this:

Are there other bookmark management solutions? Sure, just like there are plenty of other password managers. But what’s interesting about RoboForm is how embracive it feels — it does your logins, forms, in-app forms (not just browser-based forms), contacts and encrypted notes. And it somehow does it all without feeling too complex or clunky.

If you’re used to KeePass, sure, it might feel awkward at first. But if you’ve never used a password manager before, RoboForm has a way of integrating itself into your workflow, and you’ll find yourself using it for all of your passwords and forms in no time.  Let us know what you think of it or if you prefer using something completely different.

I have already shared a few FireFox addons to recover forms. However times have changed. Nowadays more and more people use several browsers randomly and we need some cross-browser-compatible tools to cover everyone’s needs.

The browser-based tools listed in this post have only some basic functionality but they are able to make your forms more usable and friendly! Besides, these web form helpers are all very easy to install, so you can test any and decide if that’s something that could turn useful to you. Let us know!

Save and Recover Forms

1. Simple Form Fixer (Greasemonkey Userscript)

Tested on: FireFox and Google Chrome

Simple Form Fixer is a nice little userscript with huge functionality: it can save and recover almost any form. The script places a red dot in the top-left corner of any page that lets you record any form:

• The icon is a red dot for web pages where there are sufficient form items to be useful for saving (If you can’t see an icon, there are no forms on the current page);
• The icon is a red square with a hole on web pages where you have already saved the form information earlier.

You can also hover over the icon to see the current status:

You can actually easily get used to how it works. The icon stays within the window frame even when the page has been scrolled down.

Once you click the red dot, the script saves everything it can find: checkboxes, radio buttons, text inputs, drop down selections and text areas.

The script also changes all the checkboxes making them a bit larger and thus easier to notice (especially for elderly people or people with poor eyesight). If you don’t like that, you can disable this behavior in about:config by setting value “greasemonkey.scriptvals.userscripts.org/Simple Form Saver.fixed_sizes” to boolean true.

2. Save and Recover Forms (Bookmarklets)

Tested on: FireFox, Google Chrome, Opera

Install the bookmarklet from here (forms should be max ~3KB)

Once you fill in all the forms on the current page, click the bookmarklet and give each form a name. Next time you are on page and want to recover any form, click the other bookmarklet, specify the form name and it will fill it in within a second.

Check / Uncheck Multiple Checkboxes

3. Checkbox Mate

Tested on: FireFox, Google Chrome

Checkbox Mate (based on this addon which is no longer supported) is a great userscript that allows you to select multiple checkboxes by drawing a box around them. To start drawing the box, hover over the top checkbox and drag down (the same logic works for un-checking boxes):

4. Check Boxes

Tested on: FireFox, Google Chrome

This is a very simple userscript that adds a menu on top of your screen allowing you to easily check / uncheck all the boxes located on the page:

5. Tick All / Untick All / (Un) Tick All (Bookmarklets)

Tested on: FireFox, Google Chrome, Opera

Three bookmarklets from the same author as the above two – can be installed from here

As the name suggests the three bookmarklets can be used to check / uncheck multiple boxes with one click of a mouse.

I hope these little form helpers will increase your productivity. Please share any other form productivity tips you use to easier fill in multiple web forms we have to deal with nowadays!

Image Credit: cc licensed flickr photo shared by axbom

I’ve had Formspring on my radar for quite some time now, wondering if it would catch on, and it has. The curiosity that the site promotes drives engaging, authentic conversations between community members, and over one billion questions have already been answered.

What Is Formspring?

As I alluded to in the introduction, Formspring is a kind of social network. Once you claim a profile and add your connections, others can visit your profile and “ask [you] anything”. Questions can pertain to sports, music, movies, comedy, opinions, or really most anything you can think of asking.

Whether it’s a universal question like “Who was your favorite teacher?” or a specific question about starting a business, Formspring provides a new, personal way to connect with the people who you want to know better.

We originally covered this platform in our directory a while back, but it has gone through a complete redesign since then.

How Do I Start Using Formspring?

If I’ve made you curious, head on over to Formspring’s homepage and try it out. You can test answering questions to see what it’s like on the site or sign up for an account by clicking on Sign up and find friends. Or, if you prefer not to create a new account from scratch you can just sign in with your Facebook credentials.

Once you get set up, you can locate your friends on the other social networks you belong to. Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace are all supported, as well as Gmail and Yahoo. Then start filling out your profile information and brand it to suit your needs. If you have a Twitter account, you’ll find Formspring’s profile settings to be pretty similar. You can fill out a Bio, Location, Website, etc.

One setting I find interesting, is the “What do you want to be asked about?” section. By default, this reads “Ask me anything“, which is great if you want to be completely open to any and all inquiries. Making this more specific however, provides a good opportunity to brand yourself as an expert in a particular area as you welcome questions in your field of expertise.  What you decide to put here is completely dependent on what your goal of using the website is.

The Process of Answering Questions

All that’s left after designing your profile is to ask and answer questions. Click on the Questions tab to be taken to your page. Anytime somebody asks you a question it will appear here.

If you don’t have any questions to answer – which is not uncommon with a new profile – you can send out a link to your profile on your social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Just select which networks you would like the message to go out to and click Send Announcement.

Or if you like, you can answer some default questions to get things going. Just click the “Or we have some questions for you!” link and a few questions will appear. As I said, you can answer the ones you want and they will appear on your profile for all to see. You can dismiss questions by clicking Delete and, if you feel the need to, you can click Block to prevent a specific user from asking you questions.

Whenever you answer a question, you have the same option to send out your answer to your social networks. This helps draw people onto your profile page for engagement opportunities. You can choose to allow anonymous questions and even go as far as protecting your account and controlling who follows you if you like. Formspring also features integration with blogging platforms like Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger.

Conclusion

And there you have it, Formspring in a nutshell. I find it very interesting how this social network has caught on and continues to reach impressive numbers. The best thing they could have done was integrate the service with Facebook and Twitter, as I’m sure that’s where the majority of users hear about the service. I do suggest you check it out, as it can be an interesting tool to add to your arsenal as we continue to mold our public images online.

What do you think of Formspring? Will you be giving it a go, and if not, why?

For building your larger marketing research questionnaires, there are a number of great free web-based tools. However, I recommend using Survey Monkey. It’s simple to use and filled with great features – plus the free version allows you to create usable surveys and properly try the product.

Survey Monkey’s Free Trial

The free version on Survey Monkey is almost a fully functioning product. They don’t limit how many surveys you can have or how long they are available for. They simply limit the types of questions you can ask (multiple check-boxes, single response, etc) and limit the number of questions per survey to 10. Obviously, the paid version has many other useful perks, but Survey Monkey have gone to some effort to ensure that the free trial is usable and permanent. This should give you a little peace of mind.

Creating A Survey

If you know what you want to ask and are a professional survey writer, you can easily write your own survey from scratch. For people who aren’t quite so certain, Survey Monkey has plenty of templates ready to use.

It’s easy to select a template and modify it slightly to suit your purposes. This can be very handy if you’re in a hurry.

Don’t forget to try out the different themes. Make your survey stand out from the crowd!

Promoting Your Survey

Survey Monkey make it easy to promote your survey when it’s complete. You can send an email with a link, get Survey Monkey to send email on your behalf, embed the survey in a website or promote on Facebook “” all in a few short steps.

The different methods of accessing the surveys are known in Survey Monkey as “collectors”. You can control these collectors and determine how users will be limited in their responses (eg. how many times they can respond and whether they can change their answers). By adding multiple collectors you can also track which types of survey promotion are most effective for you “” why go to the effort of embedding a survey if your customers all respond to your Facebook links?

Analysing Survey Results

The default free survey results display is certainly an adequate tool for the job of analysis. No results are hidden from you “” the information is simply collected and displayed in a basic table.

Strengths/Weaknesses

A failing of Survey Monkey’s free account is that free account users are shown all the same menus as a paid user, without being allowed to use them. This is a common tactic for free accounts which could be a little confusing, but certainly doesn’t detract from the overall experience.

Survey Monkey is a far more professional tool than competing poll and survey making tools. And since it’s free to use, you can easily give it a go for yourself and see what you think.

How To Make Use Of Survey Monkey?

ProBlogger has made a video on how he uses a marketing survey to work out exactly what his readers want to know more about. Specifically, he asks questions to work out what articles he should write and what sort of eBooks his readers would be willing to pay for. He actually recommends Survey Monkey for the job, too. I think this is a great idea for all bloggers to take on board. Take a look!

Need to read more?

If this isn’t quite what you’re after, MakeUseOf have featured numerous other poll and survey tools which might hit the mark:

• Wufoo ““ Easily build Forms, Surveys or Invitations
• Zoomerang: Quickly Create Online Surveys using Templates
• JotForm: Easy Form Creation Tool
• Create Simple Free Surveys With SIS Survey
• Decing: Create Private & Anonymous Polls Online
• How To Create Your Own Hosted Online Survey With LimeSurvey
• How To Use Google Docs As A Slick Survey Tool
• KwikSurveys: Quickly Make Online Surveys for Free
• KISSinsights: Easily Create Website Feedback Surveys
• The Two Best Sites To Make Your Own Online Polls
• How To Make An Online Poll In Your Sidebar Using MicroPoll

What do you think of Survey Monkey? How do you rate it compared to other free online survey tools? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Shutterstock

But cformsII is no ordinary form creator. You can customize it and create anything from a simple contact form to multi-page forms to a tell-a-friend form. So when one of my colleagues asked me to help him create an online registration form for a regional competition his company is holding, cformsII automatically popped into my mind. (This plugin might also be one of the alternative answers to this question)

This registration form would be where people could submit their personal information and copy of payment receipt to register for the competition. Here’s how cformsII features helped us to complete the task.

Downloading And Installing

Let’s start with the installation process. You can’t use the WordPress built-in plugin search to find cformsII. You have to go to their site to download the plugin.

Then go to your WordPress blog and click “Add New” sub menu under “Plugins“.

In the “Install Plugins” page, click the “Upload” link, click “Choose File” and browse for the downloaded plugin, and finally click “Install Now“.

You’ll got new new menu on the site.

Building New Forms

This plugin comes with one basic form which can be adjusted easily to fit users’ need. To begin, you can easily change the name of the form.

Then you can edit the name and type of each field of the form. Adding new lines is also as simple as telling cformsII how many and where to put the new fields. Just make sure that you’ve already planned about how many fields that you need in your form and the function of each one.

There’s the “Admin Actions” pane on the right side of the screen. You can use it to add new forms or duplicate the current form. But the most important function of this pane is the “Update Settings” button. Don’t forget to click this button every time you made changes to your form to save the changes.

The easiest way to modify each form field is to use the “Input Field Settings“. You can open the window by clicking the box in the middle of every field. (While the other boxes after the “Type” options are the delete button)

For example, you want to create checkbox with multiple choices, you can choose “Multiple Checkbox” from the drop down “Type” options, click the “Input Field Settings” button, then define each checkbox choices.

By combining text inputs and checkboxes, we can create almost any kind of form. And one of the field types is “File Upload Box” which allows people to upload small file such as copy of payment receipt.

You can also create as many forms as you need using “Add new form” or “Duplicate current form” actions.

Other Settings

Aside for the form creation, there are other settings that you can adjust within the “Form Settings” menu. If you are only creating a simple form – like Submission Form – you can just leave everything as it is with the default value. But to make sure, you might want to check the email options to confirm that the email address where the submitted form will be sent is correct.

There are two other settings that you might want to adjust: the “Global Settings“,

And the “Form Styling” where you can pick the appearance of your form(s) from the pre-made templates, and edit the CSS if you want to.

Choose one of the styles and click the “Select Style” button, and you can see a preview of what your form will look like.

Last but not the least, “Help” is always there to guide you through the difficult times.

Inserting The Form

You can insert the form into your blog post, pages and even as a widget. All you have to do is to click the cformsII button;

And pick the form that you want to insert.

If you want to use the widget, go to the “Appearance – Widgets” menu then drag and drop the cforms widget to the Widgets area.

And here’s an example of the published form.

What’s Going On Behind The Curtain?

What will happen after somebody clicks “Submit“? The content of the filled form will be emailed to the owner of the blog (or to another preferred address). The plugin comes with its own mailing system called PHPMailer.

In a normal WP environment, you do not need to configure anything. Just leave it be and it will work. But if your web hosting provider doesn’t support the native PHP “mail()” command, you can configure cformsII to utilize external SMTP server such as GMail. You can configure the settings under “Global Settings – Mail Server Settings” menu.

And as for the mail address(es) where cformsII should send the filled forms to, is configurable under “Forms Setting – Admin Email Message Options” menu.

A registration form is just one application of the many possibilities provided by the powerful cformsII. So if you ever need to add forms to your WordPress blog, you can try cformsII and modify it to your needs.

Do you use forms in your blog? What kind of forms are they? What plugin do you use? Please share your experiences using the comment section below.

Image credit: Cameron Nordholm

If you just need to get feedback through text fields, or to record a visit – take a look at Abhigyan’s article on different ways to get a guestbook on your site. If you just need a form with text fields so your visitors can provide feedback or send in requests and comments, take a look at the article I wrote on free contact form generators that should do the trick.

However, if you need the added functionality of a “file” field where your visitors can attach a file – then you’re going to need to pull out a different bag of tricks. In this article I’m going to explain which approach to doing this that I feel is the most secure, and then I’m going to show you how to use a very cool free tool on your website which lets you embed this feature on your own website.

Methods To Send A File Via Email HTML Form

There are plenty of reasons why you may need your website visitors to send you a file. Maybe you’re accepting job applications and resumes. Maybe you are a publisher and want to provide a fast way for authors to submit their short stories. Regardless of the reason, instantly transmitting files is both a convenience and a security hazard, so it has to be handled the right way.

There is an element of the FORM tag that lets you upload a file to your server through the POST method. You will need a script (ACTION) to process it and store it in a directory on your server. W3Schools provides a really useful example of how to do this using PHP, which I thought was well laid out and easy enough to follow if this approach suits you.

However, while I’ve always preferred PHP over other scripts, I don’t really feel safe letting my visitors upload a file to my server. There are ways that you can make the process more secure and block spammers, but I still get a bit uneasy about the potential for viruses or other nasty files. For this reason, I really prefer having the form submission get packaged up in an email and sent off to me.

My email system has an excellent virus scanner for file attachments, so I know I can carefully handle files using this approach. This is why I turned to the free solution called PHPMailer-FE. This is one product that’s part of a larger open source project (please donate if you use the form!)

I decided to go with a pre-developed solution, because in all honesty, even though I know how to create a form and pass it to a script that I could write to process the information – why reinvent the wheel when there are such well developed packages already out there, and PHPMailer is absolutely one of them.

Download & Configure PHPMailer

When you download the Zip file, you’ll discover 3 folders – _lib, DOCS and sample_forms. Now, the developers offer an amazing amount of documentation on their site and in the developer forums. But, to be honest, you don’t really have to change a whole lot to get a simple form working on your site.

In the “sample_forms” directory, you’ll find a few examples that the developers already created for you. In this article I’ll install the sample form.html and get it working with just a very few minor configurations. If you don’t have the ability to edit files on your web hosting account, then skip below to the edits before uploading the files. Otherwise, you can upload the files first.

Keep the same directory structure, and make sure that the HTML file with the form is only one directory up. If you want otherwise, you’ll have to change how the form references the PHP script (see below). Actually – I messed up when I uploaded, you really only need the _lib folder and the HTML file – the DOCS folder is simply for your information.

Go into the _lib folder and edit the form.config.php file. This is where you can really fine-tune how your form behaves. The only required edit is to configure where the post is going to go. I’ve also added the “subject” field, because I want to use this form on multiple websites, and when it arrives in my mailbox I want to know where it came from – the Subject line will tell you that.

To enable any of these features, all you have to do is remove the comment code “//” and you’re good to go.

An Example Of The Form In Action

To demonstrate the form, I’ve copied the example form.html onto my website. This is what it looks like.

I love this…look how simple the form is, and you can embed it anywhere you want on your webpage. It has “required” field functionality so the user can’t submit the form without at least offering their name and email address, and of course it has exactly what we’re looking for – two upload fields where the visitor can attach up to two files.  Here’s what the sample FORM code looks like (this is the form you’ll embed into your own web page).

There are two ways you can take this. Either copy all of the code in the form.html sample file from the <style> tag down, or you can pluck out just the FORM elements and insert them into your own customized form, formatted the way you want. This is most likely the approach I will take.

The only critical part of this is that the “action” should point to the location of the “phpmailer-fe.php” script. Now that I’ve got the form.html ready to go, and the form configuration file customized to send to my email address and include a subject, it’s time to test and see what happens. I went to the form and submitted just my name, email, and attached a picture of a wolf. A second or two after submitting the form, this is what arrived in my Inbox.

You’ll notice that the email header has the sender as the email address entered in the form, and the subject line tells you which website sent the form. Best of all, take a look at what’s attached to the email.

Sweet! So, with just a couple very minor configuration file edits, you can now allow your visitors to send a file via email HTML form – and you didn’t have to write a single line of code.

Customizing The Behavior Of Your Form

Before concluding, there is one little thing that’s important to modify if you want the form to appear professional. Currently, upon successful submission, it refers the visitor to this funny-looking web page by default.

That animated “Processing…” bit is actually just an animated GIF – there’s no magic behind it. This page is defined in the form.config.php file I referenced above. To customize the response pages, just open up that file again, remove the comment slashes “//” for those fields and replace the”replyemailfailed.html” entry and the “replyemailsuccess.html” entry with your own customized success or failure webpages.

I would definitely suggest going through that config file and exploring all of the ways that you can tweak how this form behaves. PHPMailer is a very versatile and useful pre-packaged form processing script that you can use for a wide variety of purposes on your website. Why reinvent the wheel when someone has already invented such a well-made and powerful car? All you have to do is get in and drive!

Do you have a use for PHPMailer on your website? Do you use your own tools or techniques to easily add forms to your site where visitors can attach files? Share your insight in the comments section below.