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Bahá'í Communications
International
5712 Deerfoot Trail
Fort Worth, Texas 76131
USA
Copyright © 1996-2005 by BCI. BCI is sponsored by the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of Fort Worth, Texas.
Using mailform.cgi
mailform.cgi is a script we have installed at BCI that you can use to retrieve information from your forms. When the user fills out your form and presses the "submit" button, mailform.cgi reads the data that the user typed into the form, prepares an email with this data in it, and sends the email to an address of your choosing. It also redirects the user to a friendly confirmation screen of your own design. An example form that uses this script is our own registration form.
To use mailform.cgi, you must edit your <form> tag and include certain hidden fields. Here is a very simple one-box input form that shows how to use the script:
<form method="POST" action="/cgi-bin/mailform.cgi">
<p>Please enter your name:
<input type="text" name="MyNameTextBox"
size="40"></p>
<input type="submit" value="Submit"
name="Button1">
<input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="somebody@somewhere.com">
<input type="hidden" name="subject" value="My Form
Results">
<input
type="hidden" name="email" value="sender@somewhere.com">
<input type="hidden" name="redirect"
value="/mydirectory/mypage.htm">
</form>
| <form... and
</form> |
Type these exactly as you see. |
| <input type="text"... | This is a simple one-line text input field. You can use other form input types as defined by HTML, such as drop down menus, scroll boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, etc. |
| <input type="submit"... | This is the button the user clicks on to send in the form. You can change the text on the button by changing the "value" field. |
| recipient | The email address of the person who should receive the form results. |
| subject | The subject line of the email that is sent to recipient. |
| The address that the email to recipient appears to come from. | |
| redirect | The URL of the web page that the user is sent to after submitting the form. This is generally a page within your website that says something like "Thank you for your feedback" and includes a link back to another page in your website. |
If you use your own domain name at BCI (like www.mydomain.org instead of www.bci.org/mydirectory), then you need to ask us to add your domain to our "referrers" list, otherwise the user will see an error message.