NAME

CGI::ContactForm - Perl extension for generating a web contact form

SYNOPSIS

use CGI::ContactForm;

contactform (
    recname        => 'John Smith',
    recmail        => 'john.smith@domain.com',
    smtp           => 'smtp.domain.com',
    styleurl       => '/style/ContactForm.css',
);

DESCRIPTION

This module generates a contact form for the web when the routine contactform() is called from a CGI script. Arguments are passed to the module as a list of key/value pairs.

CGI::ContactForm sends a well formated (plain text format=flowed in accordance with RFC 2646) email message, with the sender's address in the From: header, and the sender gets a bcc copy. If the email address stated by the sender is invalid, the failure message is sent to the recipient address, through which you know that you don't need to bother with a reply, at least not to that address...

Arguments

CGI::ContactForm takes the following arguments:

                    Default value
                    =============
Compulsory
----------
recname             (none)
recmail             (none)
smtp                (none)

Optional
--------
styleurl            (none)
returnlinktext      'Main Page'
returnlinkurl       '/'
maxsize             100 (KiB)

Additional arguments, intended for forms at non-English sites
-------------------------------------------------------------
title               'Send email to'
name                'Your name:'
email               'Your email:'
subject             'Subject:'
message             'Message:'
reset               'Reset'
send                'Send'
erroralert          'Fields with %s need to be filled or corrected.'
marked              'marked labels'
thanks              'Thanks for your message!'
sent_to             'The message was sent to %s with a copy to %s.'
encoding            'iso-8859-1'

INSTALLATION

Installation with Makefile.PL

Type the following:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Manual Installation

• Download the distribution file and extract the contents.

• Designate a directory as your local library for Perl modules, for instance

  /www/username/cgi-bin/lib

• Create the directory /www/username/cgi-bin/lib/CGI, and upload ContactForm.pm to that directory.

• In the CGI scripts that use this module, include a line that tells Perl to look for modules also in your local library, such as

  use lib '/www/username/cgi-bin/lib';

DEPENDENCIES

CGI::ContactForm requires these modules, available at CPAN:

Mail::Sender
Text::Flowed

It also requires direct access to an SMTP server.

If Mail::Sender and Text::Flowed need to be installed manually, you shall create /www/username/cgi-bin/lib/Mail and /www/username/cgi-bin/lib/Text and upload Sender.pm respective Flowed.pm to those directories.

EXAMPLES

An example CGI script (contact.pl) and a style sheet (ContactForm.css) are included in the distribution. Note that the style sheet typically needs to be located somewhere outside the cgi-bin.

VERSION HISTORY

v1.03 (Mar 30, 2003)

CGI.pm used for parsing form data.

New argument: 'maxsize' - for limiting the message size.

v1.02 (Feb 16, 2003)

DOCTYPE declaration changed to XHTML 1.1.

v1.01 (Feb 13, 2003)

CSS validation error corrected.

v1.0 (Feb 12, 2003)

Additional arguments added that makes it possible to have the form display non-English text.

Warnings enabled.

v0.4 (Feb 9, 2003)

Error alert message added. Also ContactForm.css was modified for this reason.

Simple test script included in the distribution.

v0.3 (Feb 7, 2003)

Check of email syntax modified (hopefully now closer to RFC 822).

Better structured code.

v0.2 (Feb 5, 2003)

Referer check in order to only accept data input from the generated form.

Improved email validation.

v0.1 (Feb 3, 2003)

Initial release.

LATEST VERSION

The latest version of CGI::ContactForm is available at:

http://search.cpan.org/author/GUNNAR/

http://www.gunnar.cc/contactform/

AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright © 2003 Gunnar Hjalmarsson
http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/contact.pl

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

cpanm CGI::ContactForm

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install CGI::ContactForm