Troubleshooting Forms created with the PHP Feedback Form Action
The simplest way to offer a reply form on a Freeway page is to use the PHP Feedback Form Action, which can be downloaded from http://www.actionsforge.com/projects/view/97-php-feedback-form.
This will work with most hosts, and you can see how to use it in the Freeway Moment movie tutorial (Episode 18) at http://www.softpress.com/support/tutorials/. However, note that you may not need to change the suffix of the file name from .html to .php as it states in the movie – try it with .html first and then change it to .php if you can’t get it to work.
Be aware that you cannot test the form by previewing “locally” in a browser – you will need to either upload the file to a web server first, or set up a MAMP server (see the article at http://www.softpress.com/kb/questions/59/).
COMMON PROBLEMS
If you have set everything up correctly it should just work. However, here are some common problems and what you should do to fix it.
1: When you publish your file or upload it, you see an error message in the Publish Problems dialog
Solution a: Read what the error message says. If it says: “Parameter has no value”, this means that a required setting has not been set up, so the Action will not work correctly. Usually this is because you have not built Error and Success pages so you can choose those pages in the relevant popups in the PHP Feedback Form Action palette.
Solution b: If you believe that you have all the required elements of the Action set up, make sure that you don’t have more than one PHP Feedback Form Action applied on the page. There are two types of this Action – one is a Page Action which is applied to the page itself, but there is another Action which is an Item Action which can be applied by selecting a parent HTML item (or a table) which contains the form items. Either of the Actions will work fine, but you cannot use both – and it is probably the case that one of the Actions does not have all the required settings established.
To check if you have used the Page version of the Action, make sure nothing is selected on the page and see if the PHP Feedback Form Action is displaying in one of the tabs in the Actions palette.
To check if you have used the Item version of the Action, try clicking on the header bar of the Site Panel to toggle it from “Site” to “Page” so you can see a list of all the items on the page (you may need to click on the disclosure triangle to the left of the page name). Select any item displaying the Action “cog” icon to see if any items have the PHP Feedback Form Action applied.
Remove the version of the PHP Feedback Form Action which has not been set up correctly by clicking on the “X” in the Actions tab in the Actions palette.
2: After uploading the file, completing the form and clicking the Submit button, you see a page of code in your browser or a message asking if you want to open or save a PHP file
Solution a: This probably means that you are trying to test the form “locally” (by previewing in a browser) or that your host has not enabled PHP on your server.
As stated earlier, you cannot test the form locally because the PHP which drives its functionality will only work when it is hosted on a live web server.
If you are not trying to test the form locally, contact your host to ask them to enable PHP. If your host cannot offer PHP for you to use, you might want to look into signing up with a host that does – see, for instance, the hosts we recommend at http://www.softpress.com/webhosting/.
Solution b: There may be a configuration problem with the way your server is set up. Contact your host to check if everything is set up ready to use the PHP that the Action generates. You should tell your host that the PHP file will be named after the file name of the form page with “-go.php” at the end (such as contactus-go.php).
3: After uploading the file, completing the form and clicking the Submit button, the browser shows the Error page
Solution a: This is very rare and usually only happens if the Name text field form item has been called “name” but contains no content when the Submit button is clicked, or if the Email text field form item has been called “email” but doesn’t contain the basic structure of an email address (such as using the @ character and having .com, etc., at the end).
This is happens because the Action is set up so that the Name and Email fields are “required” information. If there is no content (or doesn’t have the correct characters within it), the form is told to report an error.
To fix the problem, make sure that text has been used in the name field and that a genuine email address has been used in the email field.
Solution b: There may be a configuration problem with the way your server is set up. Contact your host to check if everything is set up ready to use the PHP that the Action generates. You should tell your host that the PHP file will be named after the file name of the form page with “-go.php” at the end (such as contactus-go.php).
4: After uploading the file, completing the form and clicking the Submit button, nothing happens
Solution: This might be because you are using a host which requires a very specific PHP file to use for form mail. GoDaddy, for instance, uses a different system to most other hosts so it often doesn’t work with the default settings of the PHP Feedback Form Action. Click on the disclosure triangle next to Advanced Settings in the Actions palette to see extra options for GoDaddy (see screenshot below).
Check the “Use GoDaddy’s Mail Script” option and also the “Define SMTP (GoDaddy)” option, then click on the “Set up info” button to see instructions on how to set things up at GoDaddy. Once you have set it up, reupload the site again.
Fasthosts is another host which is different. If the site is hosted by Fasthost, make sure an email address which uses the domain name in the address is entered in the Email recipient field and/or the Missing email address option. For example, if the domain name is www.mydomain.com, an email address with xxx@mydomain.com should be used in either the Email recipient field and/or the Missing email address options field.
5: The form is sent and you see the “Success” page, but the email you receive does not contain all the information you have asked for on your form or the information doesn’t match up to the form fields used on your form
Solution: For you to receive the correct information by email, all the form items need to have unique names – so check that each form item (text field, menu/list, etc.) has a unique name by selecting it on the page and going to the Output Settings tab of the Inspector to see its name in the Name field. See screenshot below.
If any text field or text area has the same name as any other, the information will be overwritten by data used in later fields with the same name, resulting in entered information being lost. In the worst case scenario, if all your text fields and text area items have the same name you will receive just the data entered into the last field of the entire form.
6: The form is sent and you see the “Success” page, but no mail is being received
Solution a: The emails that are being sent from your form may be treated as spam by your spam filters. You can set up an exception for this by telling your mail server that emails with the text used in the “Email title” field of the PHP Feedback Form Action palette (ie, the Subject) is not spam.
Solution b: Check that the email address used in the Email recipient field has been entered correctly.
Other features in the Action
We recommend that you open the Advanced Settings panel (by clicking on the disclosure triangle in the PHP Feedback Form Action palette) and switching on the Spam Trap option.
Doing this will create an invisible form field and, because a human won’t be able to see this field, if there is any content in the form field (such as if a spambot has entered data in all fields on the form), then the form will not be sent.
Note: There are a number of other Actions which can be used to give additional functionality to forms, to make the size of text field more reliable and also to control the styling of the form items themselves. These are covered in a different KnowledgeBase article called “Additional Actions for Forms in Freeway”.
Click on the link below to download this article as a PDF.
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Last Updated
28th of July, 2011
