So far over the top…

Okay, it’s time to stop. I’ve put together a contact form that’s so convoluted and complicated I might never be able to repeat it. I’ll clean up the code and share it with anyone who wants it. I stole most of it anyway. Well, I rewrote most of it, and combining other people’s scripts involved restructuring everything my own way, but I stole the algorithms. Regardless, I have to put together a list of credits. The idea started with Dustin Diaz’s original contact form (which has since been updated, but I wanted to work with the original groundwork). It was simple and completely insecure, but it’s what finally made me understand the underworkings of the xmlHttp object and the inner workings of AJAX. Then I added several flavors of javascript based client-side validation. Then I played with scriptaculous for some of the effects but decided to trim down and use FAT from axcentric. It’s a little jerky on some browsers but cuts the bloat of the page significantly. Then I dissected the Secure PHP Form Mailer from Dagon Design. It had to be reconstructed to return an XML file and work with the modular format I set up in the javascript. Plus, the captcha device was inaccessible to people with disabilites so I used Bad Behavior to keep spambots away.

The point of the form is to provide a contact form, submission and a thank you/error page without ever reloading/refreshing the page. It’s a simple AJAX page at work. I tried to make it modular so that all of my effort could easily be translated to other types of forms (and more elaborate forms) and maybe someday actually get put into use for a client.

The javascript requires certain fields in the form (name, email, subject, message) and any of these can be set to required by changing their class. All field names and id’s are user definable through the markup and styling is all separated into the CSS. There is no need to open the JS or PHP to modify the form. Verification of additional fields can be specified using classes in the HTML and additional fields will be passed into the body of the final message with name/value pairs.

As usual, the last day of the project was spent making the @#$@#% thing work with Internet Explorer. I think it’s working now. The CSS, the Javascript and the XML all needed tweaking to stop throwing errors in IE. Anyway, at long last… the most overwrought contact form in the world.