Pre-Installed CGI-bin Script
Formmail.cgi
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:
Back to Main Page
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
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 Followups, Post Followup 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 followup 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 followup 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 followup. Leaving this option
at 0 which is the default value, will put the previous subject line into
the followup 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 followup
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.cgi
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 contact us and we'll make sure
it's installed right away!
Page Counters
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.
AlienForm Mail Script
AlienForm is an easy to use Form to Email gateway. It uses simple templates to format all aspects of its output. It can send out more than one email at once so , you can have it send one email to you, a different courtesy reply to the user, and another to a co-worker. It can write directly to files, allowing you to log every time the form is submitted, or to store order details securely on the server.
Features
- Fully customizable output formatted by simple text templates.
- Supports both command line mailers (ie Sendmail) and network (SMTP) sending of email.
- Can send any number of different emails on every invocation.
- Can output (append) to any number of files per invocation.
- Can perform mathematical calculations on data supplied in the form- so you can total orders, work out shipping etc.
- Environment Settings (i.e. current time, user's hostname etc.) may be included in the templates.
- Can check that entered data matches a particular format- i.e. all digits, a syntactically correct email address, letters only, etc.
- Does not have to send email on every invocation- so you can have the form take a number of steps to fill out before finally being logged or emailed.
Here's how.
- Security measures include you being able to specify what forms & sites are allowed to send to the script.
- Simple, easy to understand error messages.
- alienform.html - an example HTML form that would use the templates given below
- af.cgi - the script itself
- email.txt - an example email template to be sent to you
- email2.txt - an example of an automatic courtesy reply, sent to the person using the form.
- error.txt - an example of an error template that would be outputted to the browser should something go wrong.
- output.txt - an example success template that would be outputted to the browser if everything went right.
- logfile.txt - an example of a log file template.
The af.cgi script is already configured to run.
Configure the Templates
Template file names are arbitrary. Try to use names you will remember, e.g. "email.txt", "error.txt". The file extension (.html, .txt) is irrelevant to the script.
Wherever you want the user to supply data, use a word inside square brackets, e.g. [yourname], [age].
You can have underscores in variables, as long as there is a switch in front of it.
You can specify one or more switches on the start of the variables, e.g. [re_email_address], [d_age].
Switches allowed:
r - this value is 'required'- it must be filled in.
e - this value must look like a valid email address.
d - this value may only contain digits (0-9) or a decimal point (.).
c - this value can only contain digits, a decimal point, or a dollar sign ($).
w - this value may only contain "word" characters (A-Za-z0-9).
m - this value can store multiple values (useful for checkboxes with the same name).
n - this value will have any new line characters (where the user has pressed enter) removed.
s - this value's leading and trailing white space will be removed.
The field names in the HTML must match exactly with those in the templates. I.E. same switches etc.
For the email templates, make sure the To: and From: line will have a valid email address in it (by using the e switch). If you let the user put in any old information into the To: line, your email program will generate an error.
Make sure for email templates that there is a blank line between the headers and the content.
Logging templates must have the filename to write to as the first line. Everything after the first line will be appended (tacked onto the bottom of) the file specified.
Fields in the templates such as [%HTTP_REFERER], [%REMOTE_HOST] will be substituted with their counterpart environment values. They must begin with a %. You cannot require an environment setting- if it is not set it will be left blank.
In error templates, the error title is specified as [%OUT_TITLE], and the error message is specified by [%OUT_MSG].
To do arithmetic, place the calculation in brackets like [< ... >]. Variables will be filled out before being calculated. Examples:
[< [d_age] / 2 >] - will be given the value of [d_age] divided by 2.
[< ([item1] + [item2] + [item3]) * [tax] >] - will add up the items and multiply them by the tax rate.
Remember to save the templates and the script in ASCII or Plain Text mode.
Configure the HTML
All the operations that you want to occur on this iteration are given in hidden form values. I.e. <input type="hidden" name="_send_email" value="email.txt">.
Operations are done in the order specified in the HTML. For this reason, it is recommended that you specify the browser output last.
All operations are optional.
Operations are denoted with a leading underscore.
They are:
_send_email - this sends email using the template in this tag's value.
_out_file - this logs to a file using the template given in the value.
_browser_out - this displays the value's template in the browser.
_redirect - this redirects the browser to the URL given here.
_error_path - if an error occurs, this template is displayed by the browser.
_error_url - if an error occurs, the browser is redirected to this URL.
_multi_separator - used with the 'm' value switch, this specifies which character(s) to use to seperate multiple value values. Defaults to ', '.
_format_decimals - can be used to format results from arithmetic calculations- if set to "2", the value will be rounded to two decimal points.
You can have more than one _send_email or _out_file, if you want more than one email sent or file appended to. In this case, you must specify a unique number or letter after each one- i.e. _send_email_1, _send_email_2, out_file_a, _out_file_b, _out_file_c. It really doesn't matter what you put after them, just as long as each operation is unique.
Make sure the name of each field corresponds exactly to what you want it to replace in the templates.
Multiple Page Forms
It seems some people are having difficulties setting up forms that span multiple pages. Well, it's pretty easy to do once you understand the basic concept: you use multiple _browser_out templates to gather the data in hidden form fields, then submit it all for final processing.
Here is a simple set of examples. The first form collects the submitter's age, the second collects their email address, and the third their favorite color, which then sends it on for final processing (ie. sending emails, logging, etc). Obviously real world situations are going to be a lot more complex than this.
form.html:
<form action="/cgi-bin/af2.cgi" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="_browser_out" value="part2.txt">
Your name: <input type="text" name="r_name">
</form>
part2.txt:
<form action="/cgi-bin/af2.cgi" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="_browser_out" value="part3.txt">
<input type="hidden" name="r_name" value="[r_name]">
Your age: <input type="text" name="r_age">
</form>
part3.txt:
<form action="/cgi-bin/af2.cgi" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="_send_email" value="email.txt">
<input type="hidden" name="r_name" value="[r_name]">
<input type="hidden" name="r_name" value="[r_age]">
Your email address: <input type="text" name="re_email">
</form>
This works because when the _browser_out text file is parsed, AlienForm will fill in the values in the square brackets from what the user entered.
NueQuiz
To change the password edit the file named password.cgi in directory
nuequiz. Change this enty: $password = "nuequiz";
Choose to edit an existing quiz or create a new one.
To create a new one, fill in all of the required fields (the question, the
answers, checking the correct answer and the reasoning for the answer) and
click "Add".
Access the quiz by using the number of the question in the URL.
It will display the first question of the expert quiz.
dp_market
This script includes everything needed to run your own market-place on the
internet. Users can submit adverts, which are updated at once and also send
to the webmaster if wanted. Setting up and adapting the script is easy and
requires no knowledge of Perl/CGI.
Info for running and modifying the script is in: /www/user/dp_market/readme.txt
dp_tellafriend
Letting visitors recommend your site to their friends, family and so on, is
a great way of getting more and more visitors. This script uses a standard
text-file as template, which not only makes setting it up a lot easier, but
also makes changing the "look and feel" of the email very easy.
Directory Scan (/www/user/dirscan)
The search engine receives the input from the CGI form and processes the
required files in order to find the search terms.
The list of files is found in /www/user/dirscan/fileinfo.txt. The script
would not work if it doesn't get the valid list of files. For compiling the
list of files to process use the dirscan.pl utility (so you're actually
getting two separate projects, disrcan.pl can be used separately for
creating a valid list of your files on the disk).
Add the following html code to the page directly in your /www that you want
the search button on.
<FORM name=search action="dirscan/find.cgi" method="post">
<b>Search my Homepage:</b><br>
<INPUT maxLength=128 size=40 name=string>
<INPUT type=submit value="your-domain.com" name=Submit>
Search Algorithm
For every search term that is found in a file, a file gets one point. Thus
if the search string was "really cool perl script", and the opened file
contained the word "really" 0 times, word "cool" 3 times, word "perl" 11
times and word "script" 1 time, the resulting point count would be 15 points.
Search engine features
The search engine is case-insensitive, thus "pErl", "Perl", "perl" and
"PERL" would be treated the same. The location of the search engine on the
system is not sensitive, as long as it can get to the valid list of files
provided in the fileinfo.txt file.
Is it the right one for me?
The search engine is optimized to work with the sites containing up to 300
documents, after that level the performance of the engine tends to be slow
(since it has to open every file and count the number of points the file
gets). By default it searches the documents with "*.htm" extension, but
that can be tweaked in the script.
How do I exclude files from the search?
There is no option to exclude files from the search, if you want them
excluded, an option for excluding directories exists in dirscan.pl, if you
don't want a specific file to be indexed, exclude it from fileinfo.txt, and
do it every time you run dirscan.pl, which basically re-indexes your system
and compiles a new list of valid files.
Can I customize the results screen?
The results of the search can be published with the header and the footer,
to provide HTML customization, the header and footer should be located in
/www/user/dirscan/header.txt and /www/user/dirscan/footer.txt, if you don't
need a header and a footer, comment out the function calls print_header()
and print_footer() in find.pl.
How the results are published?
The results are published as the filenames on your Unix machine, not as the
titles.
Guardian
Sends email to your default address whenever someone receives any of the
following errors when accessing your site. The 4 lines below need to be
in a file named .htaccess in your main /www directory. That file needs to
have the permission of chmod 644 (rw-r--r--).
Note that the Referer feature won't work unless you have referer logs
installed.
ErrorDocument 401 /guardian/guardian.cgi?401
ErrorDocument 403 /guardian/guardian.cgi?403
ErrorDocument 404 /guardian/guardian.cgi?404
ErrorDocument 500 /guardian/guardian.cgi?500
NewsPro
Http://domain.com/newspro/newspro.cgi (change to your own domain name)
First time login: Username = setup, Password is left blank
This takes you to a page to enter your choice of Username, Password and
email address. Click continue and complete the setup process.
At this stage NewsPro should be fully installed and working. Go back to
http://domain.com/newspro/newspro.cgi and add a news item.
The next step it to make your web pages work with NewsPro.
When you Submit News to NewsPro it is stored in a database file. Build News
takes the news entries from the database and builds them into web-usable
files. If you install addons, you may end up building several files in
several different locations, but NewsPro always builds a file called
news.txt in your /newspro directory.
news.txt contains HTML but is not a complete web page and should not be
viewed directly in a web browser. It is designed to be included into an
HTML page (often your site's home page).
SSI (server side includes) is used to add the text to your web page. When
you include an SSI in your web page, you are telling the server to merge
together two separate files before showing your page to the person visiting
your site.
In order to use SSI in a web page, you will need to give the page an
extension of .shtml rather than .html.
The exact SSI code you use to include news.txt depends on where news.txt is
located in relation to the HTML file it is being included it. If both files
are in the same directory, use:
<!--#include virtual="news.txt" -->
in your HTML file at the point where you'd like your news to appear.
If your HTML file and news.txt are in different directories, use the
relative URL from your HTML file to news.txt. For instance, if the
locations of the respective files are http://www.yoursite.com/index.html
and http://www.yoursite.com/newspro/news.txt, use:
<!--#include virtual="newspro/news.txt" -->
NOTE: don't forget to change the index.html file name to index.shtml
(Be sure that you've submitted and built news, otherwise there's nothing
to include.)
Once news.txt is being generated and included into your page, you should
have a working news system set up. If you post a news item, it will appear
on your page.
NewsPro is capable of much more than this. You can change what your news
items look like, you can archive news items and create different categories
of news.
For complete documentation
see: http://amphibianweb.com/newspro/docs/newspro_documentation.html
2BGuest
Admin login (first time password = web). Be sure to change the password by
modifying the file named 2badmin.pl in the 2bguest directory. Change the
following line to enter your new password:
$pass = "web";
http://domain.com/cgi-bin/2bguest/2badmin.pl?action=login
Random Link Generator
A random link generator with an admin URL used to add and delete links, get
the HTML code and test drive the random link. Visitors can also add their
own sites through the browser. Change your-domain.com to your own
domain name in the URLs below.
Add a randon link URL: http://your-domain.com/rando/add.html
Admin URL: http://your-domain.com/rando/rando.cgi?123456
Note: To change the password "123456" modify the rando.cgi file in the rando subdirectory.
Random Image Generator
URL: http://your-domain.com/randomage/randimg.html (change your-domain.com to your domain name)
Upload pictures to the following directory: /www/user/randomage/pics
(.png, .gif and .jpg filetypes are supported)
Features:
+Display random images
+Can be called via <IMG> tag
<IMG SRC="http://www.your-domain.com/cgi-bin/randomage/randimg.cgi">
This will successfully take a random image from the
/randomage/pics directory and display it.
+Supports multiple graphic types
+Small filesize
