Thread: GI-bin help needed

I have joined up here in the hope of getting some unambiguous advice that, as a relative beginner to web sites (although i am reasonably competent with HTML and have designed a few simple sites) i can follow!

My web space provider includes a cgi-bin. I have designed a simple feedback form ( name, contact details, comments etc) that i want to put in a site, but i do not know how to use the cgi-bin facility to get the information in a completed form sent to my e-mail when a visitor clicks on "submit".

Everything i have read or been told seems to leave something out or use terminology I haven't understood. I simply need to know what code to put into the form so that "submit" knows where to send the contents and what... if anything... I need to put in my cgi-bin so it e-mails the form contents to me.

Can someone please help?

Typically each different script needs a slightly different set up on the server, and this will also vary depending on how the server itself is set up, so this can be quite a difficult question to answer.

If you are not that familiar with coding then I would suggest investigating a few of the free toll providers out there:

http://www.wufoo.com - offer a free plan that can collect 100 form entries per month, with reporting
http://www.emailmeform.com - offer a free plan that can collect 200 form entries per month, without reporting

If you do want to try to write this yourself, then please let us know and we will help as best as we can.

Cheers,

Nowadays you don't need to use CGI for basic tasks such as sending an email. The web server has these capabilities built-in.

When you make a contact form, you specify where the information is submitted using the form's action attribute. Typically this is a confirmation web page ("Thanks for your message..."), or even the same page that the form is on. For example:

<code><form action="/contact_success.html" method="post">...</form></code>

The form data is sent to the contact_success.html file. At the top of this file, before any HTML is created, lives a PHP script that processes the data. This script then sends you an email using PHP's mail() function.

PHP is a programming language that can be embedded in web pages. Anything except the simplest of websites will need one of these. There are alternatives such as ASP or Ruby, but PHP is the most commonly used.

I found this tutorial after a quick search. No guarantees, but it looks like a good explanation to me:

kirupa.com - Creating an E-mail Contact Form

Many thanks for this (so far). I'm one of those "retired elderly gentlemen" who seems to be working harder in voluntary work than when I was paid for it, so when I eventually get a moment I'll try out some of the suggestions, but do keep the answers coming if you can help.