Autoresponders With PHP by Robert Plank
First off, check out the URL below. You'll learn how to make that today.
http://www.jumpx.com utorials/3/signup.html
Fill out your e-mail address on the page you see. (I promise it's not being
saved anywhere.) Then, wait a minute or two and check your mail. You should get
a message from Gumby (null@jumpx.com) containing a sample autoresponder
message.
Today, we're going to learn three easy things: redirection, mail sending, and
form submission.
When we finish with that, you will know how to put those components together
and create an autoresponder. Because if you think about it, that's all an
autoresponder does. Somebody enters in their e-mail address, are sent an e-mail
message, and then are redirected to a new page.
Of course there are more complex autoresponders, like Gary Ambrose's Opt-In
Lightning, or Wes Baylock's Mail Master Pro which handle multiple follow-ups
and record the e-mail addresses of those who have signed up for the responder.
But today we're just going to focus on how to make a very basic, very simple
autoresponder.
Hopefully, you've seen what form objects in HTML look like. Here's some code
you can use for an example:
<form action="some-script.php" method="post"> Enter Your E-Mail Address:
<input type="text" name="email" size="30">
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
Copy and paste this code into a file called "signup.html" and upload it to your
web server. You'll see a text box waiting for your visitor to enter his or her
e-mail address so they can be sent that autoresponse message.
Of course, the form won't work just yet because, if you look at the first line
of that HTML code I gave you, you'll see that the form submits to a script
called "some-script.php". And we haven't made that just yet.
Look on the second line of "signup.html", at the last half of the line. You
should be familiar with HTML tags, but if you're not, an HTML tag consists of
two parts: the parent tag and the attributes.
The parent tag is simply the tag's designation. For example, if you had a slice
of HTML code that looked like this:
<font face="Verdana" size="1">
Then the parent tag would be "font". The rest of what's enclosed in the tag
tells the browser what to do with it. For example, in this tag the attributes
are that the font should be Verdana with size 1.
Why am I telling you all this? Because it relates to the HTML code you see in
signup.html.
Now, when you look at this: <input type="text" name="email" size="30">
The code tells the receiving browser that this is an "input" tag, meaning that
it's a form field. The name of this item is "email" and its size is 30, meaning
this text box should be 30 characters in width.
When the form is submitted, it takes all the values of all the fields inside
that form and throws it at its destination. In this case, our destination is
"some-script.php".
If you're lost, this will all make a whole lot more sense once you try this
next step.
Make a file called "some-script.php" and paste this line of code into it:
<?php echo $email; ?>
Upload the script in the same folder as signup.html, and go to "signup.html".
Type your e-mail address in and click the submit button.
You should see a new page containing just your e-mail address and nothing else.
Is this starting to make sense? You told the PHP script to dump the contents of
the variable called "email" to the screen, and you just submitted a form with a
text box called "email".
If you want to try one more exercise like this, change the name of the text box
to, say, "goober" in signup.html and change the $email in some-script.php to
$goober. Upload both, go to signup.html, and type anything into the text box.
You'll get the same result.
This is how you'll pass data from forms (like text fields, drop down menus,
radio buttons and the like) along into the PHP scripts you create.
We've just covered how to submit form elements into PHP. Now let's focus on
sending mail.
PHP has a really simple function that uses whatever mail sending program is
installed on your server to send messages to the outside world. If you have a
crappy web server, this step might not work and you'll have to use a different
web host if you want to try this.
But if you're on a good web host that has PHP installed *correctly*, this
shouldn't be a problem.
Up until now we haven't used functions in PHP too much, aside from simple
things like include() and header(). Today's your lucky day, because functions
work in a very similar way to HTML tags. You have the parent tag, and the
attributes (or parameters).
The mail() function basically works like this:
mail("recipient","subject","body","headers");
Let's start off by sending a simple e-mail message to yourself. We won't need
any special headers this time around, so this will be quick and painless. Copy
this one line of code into "mailtest.php":
<?php mail("billg@microsoft.com","Hello","Hi. This is the body of my
message."); ?>
Replace "billg@microsoft.com" with your actual e-mail address, but be *sure* to
keep quotes around it. Save it, and upload mailtest.php to your web server and
run it in the browser. You should see a blank page. Wait a few minutes and
check your mail. You should see a mysterious mail message in your box with the
subject "Hello" and the message "Hi. This is the body of my message."
If you're using a free e-mail service or a weird ISP, the message won't come
through because a lot of mail servers these days require that certain headers
are present in the message.
Let's do that now.
What's below isn't important enough to explain thoroughly, but it's just header
information that is interpreted by the mail server. This data tells us that
we're sending a plain text e-mail, that the message came from your e-mail
address (and gives your name), and tells us that the e-mail "client" we used
was PHP.
$headers = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: $myname
<$mymail> Reply-To: <$mymail> Return-Path: <$mymail>
X-Mailer: PHP";
This is the code you should have by this point, complete with the header
information and the variables which tell the script what your name and e-mail
address are:
<?php
$email = "billg@microsoft.com";
$myname = "Your Name Here"; $mymail = "your@email.here";
$headers = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: $myname
<$mymail> Reply-To: <$mymail> Return-Path: <$mymail>
X-Mailer: PHP";
mail($email,"Hello","Hi. This is the body of my message.",$headers);
?>
Notice how we've simplified things a bit by using variables in the mail()
function. That way we don't have to retype things. This method also looks
better (in my opinion anyway) and is easier to tweak once you're ready to
actually customize it for yourself.
Try this out again. Believe it or not, but you just made your first
autoresponder! Before we move on let's make this look even cleaner:
<?php
$myname = "Your Name Here"; $mymail = "your@email.here";
$subject = "Hello"; $body = "Hi. This is the body of my message. Notice how I
can continue typing right on the next line!";
$headers = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: $myname
<$mymail> Reply-To: <$mymail> Return-Path: <$mymail>
X-Mailer: PHP";
if ($email != "") { mail($email,$subject,$body,$headers); }
?>
All I did here was just make things look nicer, but notice how I removed the
line that set $email to "billg@microsoft.com." This is because the value of
$email will be passed to the script from that form we made earlier.
This also sends the e-mail message ONLY if the value of $email is not blank. So
if someone just hit the submit button without entering an address, the script
won't try to send the e-mail message.
Everything should be ready for you to try out now. Re-upload "some-script.php"
and go to signup.html. Enter your e-mail address in the field, hit submit and
wait for that mail message to arrive.
There's only one step left to making this autoresponder complete. And that's
sending the user somewhere so they aren't given a blank page.
Find this line in your script: if ($email != "") {
mail($email,$subject,$body,$headers); }
And paste this directly underneath it: header("Location:http://www.jumpx.com");
die();
Try the autoresponder out. You'll see that once the autoresponse message is
sent, you're directed to www.jumpx.com. Now, go ahead and change it to whatever
URL you want to use. Or, make use it with a variable so the end result is like
this:
<?php
$myredirect = "http://www.my-domain-name.com hankyou.html";
$myname = "Your Name Here"; $mymail = "your@email.here";
$subject = "Hello"; $body = "Hi. This is the body of my message. Notice how I
can continue typing right on the next line!";
$headers = "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii From: $myname
<$mymail> Reply-To: <$mymail> Return-Path: <$mymail>
X-Mailer: PHP";
if ($email != "") { mail($email,$subject,$body,$headers); }
header("Location:$myredirect"); die();
?>
Don't forget to change the values above. "http://www.my-domain-name.com
hankyou.html" needs to point to the URL where thankyou.html is stored.
You're done. Don't forget to send John feedback for me. If you're really
curious as to how to do something in PHP, I might just write an article on it.
About the Author
Article by Robert Plank PHP Newsletter: http://www.jumpx.com/newsletter
Feedback? http://www.jumpx.com/feedback.php
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