Use Form Validator and save millions in lawyers fees

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!