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       '/'
formtmplpath        (none)
resulttmplpath      (none)
maxsize             100 (KiB)

Additional arguments, intended for forms at non-English sites
-------------------------------------------------------------
title               'Send email to'
namelabel           'Your name:'
emaillabel          'Your email:'
subjectlabel        'Subject:'
msglabel            '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'

Customization

There are only three compulsory arguments. The example CGI script contact.pl, that is included in the distribution, also sets the styleurl argument, assuming the use of the enclosed style sheet ContactForm.css. That results in a decently styled form with a minimum of effort.

As you can see from the list over available arguments, all the text strings can be changed, and as regards the presentation, you can of course edit the style sheet to your liking.

If you want to modify the HTML markup, you can have CGI::ContactForm make use of one or two templates. The enclosed example templates ContactForm_form.tmpl and ContactForm_result.tmpl can be activated via the formtmplpath respective resulttmplpath arguments, and used as a starting point for a customized markup.

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';

Other Installation Matters

If you have previous experience from installing CGI scripts, making contact.pl (or whichever name you choose) work should be easy. Otherwise, this is a very short lesson:

1. Upload the CGI file in ASCII transfer mode to your cgi-bin.

2. Set the file permission 755 (chmod 755).

If that doesn't do it, there are many CGI tutorials for beginners available on the web. This is one example:

http://my.execpc.com/~keithp/bdlogcgi.htm

On some servers, the CGI file must be located in the cgi-bin directory (or in a cgi-bin subdirectory). At the same time it's worth noting, that the style sheet typically needs to be located somewhere outside the cgi-bin.

DEPENDENCIES

CGI::ContactForm requires these modules:

Mail::Sender
Text::Flowed

(can be downloaded from CPAN http://www.cpan.org/ )

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.

VERSION HISTORY

v1.16 (Sep 13, 2003)

Mail::Sender errors captured also with the most recent Mail::Sender versions.

v1.15 (Aug 24, 2003)

Referer check removed, since it made the script fail with certain browsers while its security value was limited.

v1.14 (Jul 10, 2003)

Handling of error messages improved.

v1.13 (Jul 1, 2003)

Code cleanup.

v1.12 (Apr 11, 2003)

References to the form data for saving memory.

v1.11 (Apr 6, 2003)

Markup for 'erroralert' modified for greater flexibility when editing the form template.

Preparations for mod_perl.

v1.10 (Apr 4, 2003)

Template based customization added as an option.

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