Category — Forms

One Dreamweaver extension can assist, two can seriously help, but several in a bunch can boost your site to reach new horizons! Such “extension packages””, or groups of extensions usually unified by the same area of application, are called Dreamweaver Boosters. If, for example, you need your web form data saved directly into an Excel file – whcih can be very handy indeed! – then you may need an extension called Form to Excel. It does what it says: whenever the customer fills in a form, which may include attachments, all data are automatically saved in an Excel sheet. But you would normally want your web form to have a validation protocol, to avoid senseless submissions; you may want to receive an email message each time a form is filled in; you most certainly will want your form to end with a captcha code (watch out for evil robots out there!); what about being user-friendly and offer a “check all” feature? or allow for fields to auto-complete themselves when customer is entering some initial digits? These are just a few features of a perfect form. Instead of adding them one by one, you can save both time and money by uploading a Dreamweaver Booster for PHP Forms.

Other Boosters exist: such as SEO Booster, for example; we will describe this one in detail when we cover extensions that concern Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Dreamweaver extensions cover a large variety of situations that a webmaster can come across in his or her work. A large amount of extensions have been written to address the problems, or deficiencies, that can arise during the interaction “website/customer”. Here’s one example. 

Now that many websites actively invite their users to contribute to its content, such as texts, pictures, or videos, one of the moments that define the user-friendlyness and visual attractiveness of your website is the Upload Interface. Say, you want your user to upload pictures. You want to allow them to upload up to 50 pictures. But they could upload just one, or two, or maybe they’ll want to be generous and will send you all 50? Should you have 50 Browse buttons for each possible upload? Of course not. The most appropriate solution is to generate an Upload item (allowing to browse and locate the needed file on the hard disk, which then becomes available for upload to your server), dynamically. What does it mean? It means that if a user uploaded ONE picture, another Browse button will appear, inviting to keep uploading; and so forth, until the user reaches a maximum of allowable uploads. 

Multiple File Fields

This handy element can be easily inserted into your webpage by using a Dreamweaver extension called Multiple File Fields. You can use it to let your customers attach all kinds of files; this way they can easily submit text documents, such as resumes, work references, examples of written work, etc; but it is most often used to upload multiple pictures in dating or matchmaking sites, rental sites, where people upload pictures of their properties, and many more.

As you see, no magic is needed to make your upload interface look neat.  Just remember the magic words “Dreamweaver extensions”…

If you work with forms, you soon realize your Dreamweaver needs to be bigger. The moment always comes when you start looking for a Dreamweaver extension that will do what you need and save your time. 

A typical situation with forms is that you want people to tell you their shoe size, and they type “Red”. It can seriously drive you nuts, especially if you have large volumes of forms to process, and hopefully lots of shoes to ship off to your customers. It becomes even more problematic if they say something like “john2991” in the email field, or if they skip a number in the credit card, which, of course, will result in a denied charge. You could also want their phone numbers to include their country code. You would be surprised at how many people in the United States never ever write +1 before their phone number. If a customer leaves a phone number like this: 86215623190, you could assume it is a customer from New Jersey, area code 862, OR from Shanghai, China, country code 86, area code 21. Of course, you would normally have a field for the address, or country of origin, which would help you figure it out, but most Big Dreamweavers do instead, is use validation protocols, which force your website visitors to submit the information correctly - i.e. according to the standard that you set up yourself.

Now, there is a risk of making it too difficult. Doesn’t it drive you crazy when you try to fill out a registration form on some website and it keeps bouncing you back, saying, “your selected passwords don’t match”! “please enter a valid postal code!” “please enter a valid year of birth!”. A good rule of thumb is, don’t ever ask too much. We’ve got enough big brothers inquiring about every single aspect of our lives, as it is. So don’t ask for users’ data unless you really really need it for their own sake - shoe size seems a fair request if you sell shoes…birth year doesn’t.

Form Validator is an Dreamweaver extension that does exactly what it says: it validates your forms before they are sent through to you. If your customer types “Red” in the field that asks for her shoe size, as soon as she clicks on Submit, a prompt will show up saying “Invalid entry in field: shoe size”, or, perhaps, “Hmm… something doesn’t look right. Are you sure about your shoe size?” - if you want to sound cool. In fact, if you sell really funky shoes, and your whole website is waaay cool, the freedom to set the “error message” to say what you want is rather important. You don’t want to sound like a bureaucrat rejecting a passport photo because your smile is too big.

Form Validator comes with several validation rules preset, so you don’t have to think about practically anything, just keep clicking. It will require a bit more of your attention if you decide to set up your own validation rules, because you will then have to come up with a “valid regular expression” that matches your rule. In most cases you will able to find a regular expression by searching on Google. Just don’t forget to place the expression between /brackets/ when you insert this extension in your Dreamweaver.

A typical case of validation requires the user to check “I accept Terms and Conditions” box before proceeding; simply imagine the millions of dollars that this Dreamweaver extension could save you in court of law!