Pre-Installed CGI-bin Scripts
The script is one from Matt's Script Archive which we
have installed and preconfigured for your domain.
FormMail is a generic www form to e-mail gateway,
which will parse the results of any form and send them
to the specified user. This script has many formatting
and operational options, most of which can be
specified through the form, meaning you don't need any
programming knowledge or multiple scripts for multiple
forms. This also makes FormMail the perfect
system-wise solution for allowing users form-based
user feedback capabilities without the risks of
allowing freedom of CGI access.
There is only one form field that you must have in
your form, for FormMail to work correctly. This is the
recipient field. Other hidden configuration fields can
also be used to enhance the operation of FormMail on
your site. The action of your form needs to point
towards this script (obviously), and the method must
be POST in capital letters.
Here's an example of the form fields to put in your
form:
<FORM
METHOD=POST ACTION=" http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi">
<input type=hidden name="recipient" value="whoever@yourdomain.com">
<input type=hidden name="subject" value="Order">
<input type=hidden name="return_link_url"
value="http://yourdomain.com/">
<input type=hidden name="return_link_title"
value="Back to Main Page">
The following are descriptions and proper syntax for
fields you can use with FormMail.
Recipient Field
Description: This form field allows you to
specify to whom you wish for your form results to be
mailed. Most likely you will want to configure this
option as a hidden form field with a value equal to
that of your email address.
Syntax: <input type=hidden name="recipient"
value="email@yourdomain.com">
Subject Field
Description: The subject field will allow you
to specify the subject that you wish to appear in the
email that is sent to you after this form has been
filled out. If you do not have this option turned on,
then the script will default to a message subject:
"WWW Form Submission".
Syntax: If you wish to choose what the subject
is:
<input type=hidden name="subject" value="Your
Subject">
To allow the user to choose a subject:
<input type=text name="subject">
Email Field
Description: This form field will allow the
user to specify their return email address. If you
want to be able to return e-mail to your user, I
strongly suggest that you include this form field and
allow them to fill it in. This will be put into the
From: field of the message you receive. If you want to
require an email address with valid syntax, add this
field name to the 'required' field.
Syntax: <input type=text name="email">
Realname Field
Description: The realname form field will allow
the user to input their real name. This field is
useful for identification purposes and will also be
put into the From: line of your message header.
Syntax: <input type=text name="realname">
Redirect Field
Description: If you wish to redirect the user
to a different URL, rather than having them see the
default response to the fill-out form, you can use
this hidden variable to send them to a pre-made HTML
page.
Syntax: To choose the URL they will end up at:
<input type=hidden name="redirect" value="http://yourdomain.com/to/file.html">
To allow them to specify a URL they wish to travel to
once the form is filled out:
<input type=text name="redirect">
Required Field
Description: You can require certain fields in
your form to be filled in before the user can
successfully submit the form. Simply place all field
names that you want to be mandatory into this field,
separated by commas. If the required fields are not
filled in, the user will be notified of what they need
to fill in, and a link back to the form they just
submitted will be provided.
To use a customized error page, see 'missing_fields_redirect'
Syntax: If you want to require that they fill
in the email and phone fields in your form, so that
you can reach them once you have received the mail,
use the syntax like:
<input type=hidden name="required" value="email,phone">
Env_report Field
Description: Allows you to have Environment
variables included in the email message you receive
after a user has filled out your form. Useful if you
wish to know what browser they were using, what domain
they were coming from or any other attributes
associated with environment variables. The following
is a short list of valid environment variables that
might be useful:
REMOTE_HOST - Sends the hostname making the request.
REMOTE_ADDR - Sends the IP address of the remote host.
HTTP_USER_AGENT - The browser the client is using.
(Note: In our case, both REMOTE_HOST and REMOTE_ADDR
are the same, since our servers don't do the reverse
DNS lookup needed to generate the true REMOTE_HOST
string).
Syntax: If you wanted to find all the above
variables, you would put the following into your form:
<input type=hidden name="env_report" value="REMOTE_HOST,
REMOTE_ADDR,HTTP_USER_AGENT">
Sort Field
Description: This field allows you to choose
the order in which you wish for your variables to
appear in the email form that FormMail generates. You
can choose to have the field sorted alphabetically or
specify a set order in which you want the fields to
appear in your mail message. By leaving this field
out, the order will simply default to the order in
which the browsers send the information to the script
(which is usually the exact same order as they
appeared in the form). When sorting by a set order of
fields, you should include the phrase "order:" as the
first part of your value for the sort field, and then
follow that with the field names you want to be listed
in the email message, separated by commas.
Syntax: To sort alphabetically:
<input type= hidden name="sort" value="alphabetic">
To sort by a set field order:
<input type=hidden name="sort"
value="order:name1,name2,etc...">
Print_config Field
Description: print_config allows you to specify
which of the config variables you would like to have
printed in your e-mail message. By default, no config
fields are printed to your email. This is because the
important form fields, like email, subject, etc. are
included in the header of the message. However some
users have asked for this option so they can have
these fields printed in the body of the message. The
config fields that you wish to have printed should be
in the value attribute of your input tag separated by
commas.
Syntax: If you want to print the email and
subject fields in the body of your message, you would
place the following form tag:
<input type= hidden name="print config" value="email,
subject">
Print_blank_fields Field
Description: print_blank_fields allows you to
request that all form fields are printed in the return
HTML, regardless of whether or not they were filled
in. FormMail defaults to turning this off, so that
unused form fields aren't emailed.
Syntax:
< input
type=hidden name="print_blank_fields" value="1">
Title Field
Description: This form field allows you to
specify the title and header that will appear on the
resulting page if you do not specify a redirect URL.
Syntax: If you wanted a title of 'Feedback Form
Results':
<input type=hidden name="title" value="Feedback Form
Results">
Return_link_url Field
Description: This field allows you to specify a
URL that will appear, as return_link_title, on the
following report page. This field will not be used if
you have the redirect field set, but it is useful if
you allow the user to receive the report on the
following page, but want to offer them a way to get
back to your main page.
Syntax:
<input
type=hidden name="return_link_url" value="http://yourdomain.com/index.htm">
Return_link_title
Description: This is the title that will be
used to link the user back to the page you specify
with return_link_url. The two fields will be shown on
the resulting form page as:
Syntax:
<input
type=hidden name="return_link_title" value="Back to
Main Page">
Cgiemail
Cgiemail is another form processing script, totally
different than FormMail, discussed above. It is a
program written in the C language that takes the
contents of fill-in boxes on a form and emails them to
a specified location. In addition to the form
specification in the .html file, a mail specification
in a .txt file is required to format the resulting
email message.
We provide the cgiemail in the cgi-bin directory of
your server. You need to have an action in your
order.htm file to call it. It should look like this:
<form
method=post action="http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/cgiemail/order.txt">
Details are provided below. While there are a number
of subsections below this one, they all work together
and are meant to be read from start to finish.
order.htm
Look for a file in your www directory called order.htm.
This is our example form we put on your site that
shows how a form should be configured to work with
Cgiemail. Look at it in a browser, and download it to
your hard drive using FTP so you can see how it works.
If you've never dealt with HTML forms before, don't
worry, they're easy to create and understand.
The form prompts the user for data which is sent to
the server as simple key-value pairs. Each <input> tag
specifies a record. The key is given by the name
attribute, and the value is given by the value
attribute. The type attribute tells the browser
what kind of data to expect. Now, try looking at the
example.
Please note that the hidden items are used to transmit
critical info to Cgiemail. They provide the location
of the success file, the name of the person the
results should be sent to, and the subject of the
form. When making your own forms, you may want to
change the email address in the "required-to" field,
and likely the subject in the "subject" field. The
first item tells Cgiemail what to show the user after
successfully completing the form. You can, but don't
need to customize this.
After that come the items that are actually presented
to the user. You'll want to use type=text input items
with cgiemail: it's a simple tool. The size=60 tells
the browser how big to make the box. The
name=something is required in each input tag,
otherwise the browser wouldn't know how to send the
data to the server. The value=" " attribute is correct
in most cases, unless you want a default value in the
form.
Note that if a field begins with required-, cgiemail
will require that the user enter a value for this
field. This is particularly useful if you want to
require a user to submit their email address.
When the user presses the Submit button, the data goes
to our machine where cgiemail starts doing something
with it. What is does is controlled by the order.txt
file discussed below.
By the way, you can name your HTML form anything you
want to.
order.txt
Now that we have all this data, what do we do with it?
Mail it, of course! But for flexibility, cgiemail
requires that you create a mail.txt file to show it
what to send. (If you didn't want flexibility you'd
use a mailto link.) The program will read this file,
perform substitutions, and pass it to the mail system.
Make sure that you upload mail.txt in ASCII mode.
Failure to upload mail.txt in ASCII mode will generate
the message:
"Server Error: The server encountered an internal
error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete
your request."
There is already an example order.txt document in the
forms directory in your www directory.
By the way, there's nothing magical about the name
order.txt. Feel free to call it mail1.txt or
form1.mail, or whatever suits you, as long as the form
has the correct name for what you uploaded.
Note that the first several lines are mail headers.
You probably shouldn't change that part, or the
corresponding parts in your form. In particular, there
must be a To: header or the mail won't go anywhere!
What cgiemail does is simply replace every string that
looks like [key] with the value the user typed into
the field with name=key. That's all. You can lay out
your form as is best for your users, but lay out your
mail.txt as is best for you to read. You can even
insert gobs of text to help format the output. Only
the [key] parts will be replaced by cgiemail.
Cgiemail does not report environmental variables like
FormMail will, but other than that, it is an excellent
program, allowing you more flexibility in the way you
want your data returned by the form.
Secure Server Order Forms
Normally, any text (such as your credit card number)
sent from your browser to the web server is sent as
plain text. This means that a hacker could potentially
intercept (however unlikely) the information sent from
your browser and read it. However, by using the secure
server, the information is encrypted before it is sent
from your browser. It would be practically impossible
for anyone to decrypt it without knowing the key.
Please use the secure server only when necessary, as
when requesting sensitive information from your
visitors.
The domains hosted by us are housed on any number of
computers and all of them have a different machine
name. To find out what machine name to use for your
secure order access calls, check the faq file of your
domain at:
http://www.yourdomain.com/faq.html
Each server has its own site-secure.net site, and
although you will be putting your form on your own
domain, it must be called through the site-secure.net
server in order for the form to be secure.
To do this, create your form as usual and put it
somewhere in your www directory. You can put your form
anywhere you want to, but for this example, let's
assume the normal URL for your form can be accessed
from a browser with this URL:
http://www.yourdomain.com/signup/secureform.html
To call the form through the secure-order server, you
need to use the following URL to access your pages via
the secure server (even though your form resides on
your own domain space): https://machinename.site-secure.net/yourdomain/signup/secureform.html.
That would be the URL you would put as an <HREF> to
link to your form from whatever page you have your
visitors link from. Don't forget the "s" in "https."
Your cgi-bin dir is: https://machinename.site-secure.net/yourdomain/cgi-bin/
Special instructions for using FormMail.cgi with
the Secure Server
If you are using formmail.cgi through the secure
server, you can still place your form anywhere on your
webspace you want to, but you MUST use the following
URL as the ACTION of your form: https://crimson.site-secure.net/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi
Here's an example of how the first parts of your form
might look:
<FORM
METHOD=POST ACTION= "https://crimson.site-secure.net/
cgi-bin/formmail.cgi">
<input type=hidden name="recipient" value="whoever@yourdomain.com">
<input type=hidden name="subject" value="Order">
<input type=hidden name="return_link_url"
value="http://yourdomain.com/">
<input type=hidden name= "return_link_title" value=
"Back to Main Page">
It is still important that you call your order page
through a secure URL in order to work properly. For
example: https://crimson.site-secure.net/ yourdomain/order.htm.
Guestbook allows you to set up your own comments page.
From there, visitors can add entries to your guestbook
and they will be displayed with the most recent at the
top and scrolling down, or vice versa. Other options
include the ability to limit HTML in the entry, link
to e-mail address with mailto tag, use a log to log
entries, redirect to a different page after signing,
emailing whenever a new entry is added, and much more.
Guestbook is already set up for use on your server.
You can simply use the following URL to access it:
http://yourdomain.com/Guestbook/guestbook.html
If you want to change any of the configuration
options, locate the guestbook.cgi file in your
Guestbook directory (inside your www directory).
Download it to your hard drive in ASCII mode, and save
it somewhere safe. Create a copy of the file and give
it the same name, then edit the options as specified
below. Keep your backup of the original guestbook.cgi
in case you run into problems.
Option 1: $mail
This option will allow you to be notified via an
E-mail address when a new entry arrives in your
guestbook. The entry will be mailed to you as a
notification. If you should choose to turn this
variable on you will need to fill in the 2 variables
that go along with it:
$recipient - Your email address, so that the mailing
program will know who to mail the entry to.
$mailprog - The location of your sendmail program on
your host machine.
Option 2: $uselog
This will allow you the ability to use the short log
feature. It is already turned on so you will have to
change it to 0 if you do not wish to use it. It has
been implemented since there are probably many people
who feel no need to have a log when people are making
entries to a file anyway. Keep in mind that it will
show errors which is one nice aspect about it.
Option 3: $linkmail
Turning this option on will make the address links in
your guestbook become hyperlinked. So instead of
simply having (name@some.host) it will put
(<a href=" mailto:name@some.host">name@somehost</a> so
that anyone can simply click on the address to email
them.
Option 4: $separator
This allows you to choose whether you want guestbook
entries to be separated by a Paragraph Separator <p>,
or a Horizontal Rule <hr>. By changing the 0 in the
script to a 1, you will turn on the <hr> separator and
turn off the <p> separator. The 0 option will do the
reverse of that; turn on the <p> and turn off the
<hr>.
Option 5: $redirection
By choosing 1 you will enable auto redirection and 0
will return a page to the user telling them their
entry has been received and click here to get back to
the guestbook.
Option 6: $entry_order
Set this option to 0 and the newest entries will be
added below the rest of the entries. Keep this option
at 1 and the guestbook will add the newest entries at
the top.
Option 7: $remote_mail
Many users of the guestbook have requested that a form
letter be automatically sent to the remote user when
they fill in the guestbook. Turning this option on
will tell the script to automatically mail any user
who leaves an email address. You can specify the
contents of the mail message by editing the section of
the script that sends mail to the remote user. By
default it sends a message that says, "Thank you for
adding to my guestbook." and then shows them their
entry. If you should choose to turn this variable on,
you will need to fill in the 2 variables that go along
with it:
$recipient - Your email address so that the mailing
program will know who to mail the entry to.
$mailprog - The location of your sendmail program on
your host machine.
Option 8: $allow_html
This option allows you to turn on or off the use of
HTML tags by users of your guestbook. Setting this
variable to 1 allows users to embed html tags such as
<b> or <H1> or <a href=" "></a> into your html
document. Setting this variable to 0 will not allow
them to use any html syntax in their comments or any
other field. You can still link to their comments or
any other field. You can still link to their email
address by turning $link_mail to 1.
There is also the ability for users to add their own
URL and then their name is referenced to their URL in
the guestbook.html file. This helps to eliminate the
need for allow_html to be turned on, and lets users
point you to a spot that will tell you more about
them. Several users of the guestbook script have asked
for this option. If you wish to disable the option,
simply delete the following line from your
addguest.html file:
URL: <input type=text name=url size=50><br>
These are the rest of the important guestbook files
found in your Guestbook directory:
guestbook.html
This is the file that you will link to that will
contain the Guestbook Entries. You may want to edit
the title and heading spaces and customize the look
any way you desire. Do not delete the line
<!--begin--> from this guestbook, or else the script
will have no way of knowing where to begin the
editing. The <!--begin--> line is the only necessary
line in your guestbook.html file, but the link to the
addguest.html file is also a good idea. :-)
addguest.html
This is a fill-out form to add a new entry into the
guestbook. This is also customizable as long as the
action tags and basic field names in the form remain
the same.
guestlog.html
This is a short log that lists domains and times that
entries were created. Much easier to browse and it
will point out those failed entries when users did not
specify a name or comments. You will need to give the
file read/write access.
Visitor Links Page
Visitor Link Page allows you to set up a web page
which your users can then add links to in specified
categories. Newest links are added to the top of each
category. A running total of the number of links
present as well as the time when the last link was
added is shown at the top of the page. Your
preconfigured Visitor Links page is already set up on
your server at http://www.yourdomain.com/links/links.htm.
The only configuration you may want to do is to
customize the look of the links.htm page. Just leave
the method and input tags the way they are. If you
decide to change the category names, you must do so in
the links.htm document, AS WELL AS the links.pl file
in your cgi-bin.
Random Text Generator
This script is preconfigured for your server. There is
a directory in your www directory called "random."
Inside that directory is a file called random.txt.
Just download this file to your hard drive and edit it
with any random text you would like placed in an html
document. Remember to keep the %% separator between
quotes. You can use any html formatting tags you want
to, including <href> tags so you can configure it as a
random link generator. You can put in as many quotes
as you wish. Upload the random.txt file to your server
in the same location you found it, remembering to
upload it in ASCII or text mode.
The script uses SSI (Server Side Includes) so the page
you want to use random text on must have the .sht, .shtm,
or .shtml extension. On your page, just put this tag
wherever you want the random text to appear:
<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/randomtext.cgi"-->
That's all there is to it!
WWW Board
WWW Board is a threaded World Wide Web discussion
forum and message board, which allows users to post
new messages, follow-up to existing ones and more. It
is already preconfigured for your server. Just go to
http://www.yourdomain.com/bbs to post your messages
there.
There are several options you may want to configure.
First of all, the index.sht file in the bbs directory
can be customized any way you wish as long as you
leave the method and input tags the way they are.
Additionally, here are some options contained in the
wwwboard.pl script itself (located in your cgi-bin
directory) which you may want to change, depending on
your needs:
$show_faq = 1;
This option allows you to choose whether or not you
want to display a link to the FAQ on every individual
message page or not. It defaults to 1 and the link
will be put in at the top of the message along with
links to Follow-ups, Post Follow-up and Back to
$title. Setting this to 0 will turn it off, and
keeping it at 1 will keep the link. You need to create
a faq.html file and put it inside the bbs directory.
The FAQ can contain any information you want to give
your visitors about how the board works, your
organization, types of postings that will be allowed,
etc.
$allow_html = 1;
This option lets you choose whether or not you want to
allow HTML mark-up in your posts. If you do not want
to allow it, then everything that a user submits that
has <>'s around it will be cut out of the message.
Setting this option to 1 will allow HTML in the posts
and you can turn this option off by setting it to 0.
$quote_text = 1;
By keeping this option set to 1, the previous message
will be quoted in the follow-up text input box. The
quoted text will have a ':' placed in front of it so
you can distinguish what had been said in the previous
posts from what the current poster is trying to get
across. Setting this option to 0 will leave the
follow-up text box empty for the new poster.
$subject_line = 0;
There are three options for the way that you can
display the subject line for the user posting a
follow-up. Leaving this option at 0 which is the
default value, will put the previous subject line into
the follow-up form and allow users to edit the subject
however they like. Setting this option to 1, however,
will quote the subject, but simply display it to the
user, not allowing him or her to edit the subject
line. The third and final option can be achieved by
setting the $subject_line variable to 2. If it is set
to 2, the subject will not be quoted and instead the
user will be prompted with an empty subject block in
their follow-up subject line.
$use_time = 1;
This option allows you to choose whether or not you
want to use the hour:minute:second time with the
day/month/year time on the main page. Day/Month/Year
will automatically be placed on the main wwwboard.html
page when a new entry is added, but if you leave this
variable at 1, the hour:minute:second time will also
be put there. This is very useful for message boards
that get a lot of posts, but if you would like to save
space on your main page, you can set this to 0,
causing the hour:minute:second display not to be
added.
Search will look at all your html pages for words you
enter, and return all pages on a list with links. This
program is completely configured and ready to run, but
for Search.cgi to return a response, it need to be
activated. This is easily done by logging in via
telnet and at the prompt after login type the
following command:
chmod +r /www/yourdomain
Now you can access search.cgi with the following URL:
http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi.
There is a configuration file called search_define.pl
which accompanies search.cgi and sets up the variables
for it. You can customize which files you wish to
exclude from searches, and also the cosmetics of the
search and results pages.
Single Page Shopping Cart (on
qualifying accounts only)
There should be a Single Page Shopping Cart program
installed on your server. You can see what it looks
like by going to this URL with your browser:
http://www.yourdomain.com/shop/boutique.html
If you want to customize the shopping cart, (and you
will if you want to sell products using this program),
you can visit:
http://virtualpublisher.com/
The Virtual Publisher Shopping Cart program is
sophisticated and complex. Rather than reprint all
their directions here, please go to their website and
download the help files associated with it.
If the Single Page Shopping Cart program wasn't
installed on your server and you want it, please send
us email and we'll make sure it's installed right
away!
There are 3 different types of page counters you can
place on your pages. The first is a no-frills
graphical counter which looks like this:
To use this one, put the following tag somewhere on
your page, but change the yourpage.htm to be the
address of the actual page you are putting this
counter on. Also, don't break up the tag like we did.
We had to do that to fit it on the page. The width=5
part refers to how many digits you want in your
counter.
<IMG
SRC="/cgi-bin/nph-count? width=5&link=http://yourdomain/yourpage.htm">
Graphical counter: A simple counter called using "img"
tag. You can edit the count on any page by going to
the counter directory off of your main www and
changing the number in the txt file of the page you
would like to correct. http://yourdomain.com/counter
Finally, the simplest kind of page counter is a
text-based counter. It uses SSI so the page you are
putting it on must have the .sht, .shtm, or .shtml
extension. It will look like whatever text and size
attributes you give it on your page. The tag looks
like this:
<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-yourdomain/counters/counter.cgi"-->
After you've put the counter on your page, look at it
with your browser. If you don't see the counter the
first time, hit reload. Then you should see the number
1. If you want to change the page count, FTP to your
site, and look in the counters directory in your cgi-bin.
There will be a file there with the name of whatever
page you placed this counter on. Just upload a new
text file with a new number on it, and that will be
the new count on the page next time you hit reload.
Remember to upload the file in ASCII or text format. |
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