About

Set up one page to be included in multiple sites, where the only difference will be a few variables defined by you. This is very useful is you run several similar sites (like a bunch of fanlistings) where a couple of pages are always the same except for the site name, the url etc. This script is currently in use on all of my fanlistings for the Rules and the About pages.

Install

I’ll show you how to do this by example. Say you own loads of fanlistings (like I do), and your Rules pages always looks something like this:

• You must be a fan of [SUBJECT]
• You must fill in your country on the Join Form
• If you own a website, you must provide a link back to [URL]. You may use a text link or one of the codes I created.
• If you own a porn/hate/offensive site, I will not link you. I will add you to the member list, but I won’t add your URL.

This page looks the same on all my fanlistings, except for [SUBJECT] and [URL]. Instead of having to copy and paste this code into all my Rules pages for all my fanlistings, I will only create this page once.

Open up Notepad/Editpad/your preferred HTML coding editor. Create a blank page and save it as whatever.php (replace whatever with your own page name). For this example, I’ll assume you named the page rules.php and that you will upload it to the root directory of your website.

Copy and paste the HTML from your Rules page (or any other page you’re doing this with) into the .php file. Now look at the bits that will be different for each site. In the example above, that would be [SUBJECT] and [URL]. Replace those bits with the following: <?php echo $subject; ?> and <?php echo $url; ?>. The <?php opens the PHP tag, the echo part says that a variable should be displayed, and the dollar sign lets the php script know that what follows is a variable. You can change the “subject” and “url” to anything you want, and you can put as many variables in the .php file as you want. Just make sure the coding around it remains intact.

Now open up the pages you want to include this file into. Remove the HTML that you copied into the rules.php file, and insert the following:

<?php

//Put the variables that you have in the .php script below, with the right values for this page.

$subject =  "BlaBlaBla";
$url = "http://blabla.site.com";

//This will include the .php file. Be sure to replace "yoursite.com" with your own site address,
//and "rules" with whatever you named your .php page

include "rules.php";
?>

Read the code carefully and look for the lines that start with //. They are comments, and explain what and where you need to change something. If you have any problems with it, or any questions about this script, please feel free to leave a message at the forums. Please note that the page you are inserting this code into has to have a .php extension, otherwise it won’t work!!

Always wanted to convert your site to PHP, but always too intimidated to try? Read on, because I have here the easiest and fastest way to convert your site to PHP.
Are you already using PHP on your site? Then read on anyway, because the coding used here is optimized, for faster page loading and less hassle for you.

This script will allow you to put the content for all of your pages into one file, and will display the content needed depending on what url you send your visitors to. The advantages over other PHP conversion scripts you may have seen:

• All your content will be in one file. No more index.php, about.php, rules.php, codes.php etc…everything will be in index.php. Only one file to edit and upload and it takes up less space on your server.
• Shorther URLs. It will be index.php?about instead of index.php?z=about.inc
• Faster loading pages. Since the content is all inside the one page, the PHP script doesn’t have to go and get other files off the server, making your pages load faster.
• Less coding. One line of PHP code will do all this for you.

Install

I’ll show you how to do this by example. Say you want to use this on a fanlisting you own. You would normally have the following pages: index, about, rules, join, codes, members and extra.

Open up all these pages in your HTML editor, and then create a blank page in Notepad/Editpad/your text editor of choice. Paste the following code into the blank page, and save it as index.php (or any other name you like…as long as the extension is .php).

<?php

//Copy and paste the HTML that is the same in all your pages (the header and footer) into new files and name them header.php and footer.php.
//They will be included at the complete top and bottom of your pages, so you will only have to edit these 2 files if you want to change your layout.

include 'header.php';

if (!$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) { ?>

//Paste here the HTML coding you have on your main page. This is what people will see when they go to index.php, without any ?section bit after it.

<?php } elseif ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == "about") { ?>
//Paste here your HTML code on the About page (without the header and footer code, obviously).

<?php } elseif ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == "rules") { ?>
//Paste here your HTML code on the Rules page (without the header and footer code, obviously).

<?php } elseif ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == "join") { ?>
//Paste here your HTML code on the Join page (without the header and footer code, obviously).

<?php } elseif ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == "codes") { ?>
//Paste here your HTML code on the Codes page (without the header and footer code, obviously).

<?php } elseif ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == "members") { ?>
//Paste here your HTML code on the Members page (without the header and footer code, obviously).

<?php } elseif ($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] == "extra") { ?>

//Paste here your HTML code on the Extra page (without the header and footer code, obviously).

<?php }
include 'footer.php'; ?>

Read the code carefully and look for the lines that start with //. They are comments, and explain what and where you need to change something. If you have any problems with it, or any questions about this script, please feel free to post about it at the forums. Please note that the page you are inserting this code into has to have a .php extension, otherwise it won’t work!!

You can add as many of the elseif lines as you want to, and you can name them anything you want. Just remember that in order to access that section, you will need the url to be index.php?yourname, with yourname being what you changed the text in quotation marks (in the example above, that would be about, rules join, etc.) to.

For my larger sites, I prefer to split the site up into sections (such as site, about the person and media), and have the coding above pasted into those php pages (so all the media things, such as images, audio and video will be in media.php, all site related sections such as about, credits, link me, affiliates etc. are in the site.php page and so on). That way, you won’t have one index file that is a mile long, and I won’t have to scroll through many lines of coding I don’t need to get to a section I need to edit.

If you use the coding exactly as I have pasted it above in the text box, you will have to change your navigation bar URLs to the following:

• About: index.php?about
• Rules: index.php?rules
• Join: index.php?join
• Codes: index.php?codes
• Members: index.php?members
• Extra: index.php?extra

Now with image verification and multiple form compatibility!

New version 2.2.1: Minor update - removed name and email address from email headers to protect further against header injection.

Email the contents of any online form to yourself (or someone else, if you want it to). Very easy to set up and use, and it doesn’t require any of that CHMOD/cgi bin business most other Form Mail scripts need. You’ll have it up and running in minutes.

Current version: 2.2.1.

Install

1. Open up form.php and edit it to fit in with your website. Or alternatively, create your own HTML form (as long as it has a .php extension) and have it point to nlphpmail.php in the <form action=""> tag, (see the example in form.php if you are not sure how to do this).

   Make sure you change this value to match the subject of the email you want to be sent:

   <input type="hidden" name="subject" value="SUBJECT HERE" />

   If you are creating your own form page, remember to add this or your email will have no subject (which some email clients identify as spam, and some servers refuse to send).

2. Open nlphpmail.php in a text editor such as Notepad and read through the file - instructions are given where edits are required.

3. Upload the form, captcha.php, verify.jpg and nlphpmail.php to your webserver. They can be in any folder you wish, as long as they are in the same folder. If you upload nlphpmail.php into a different folder from the form, make sure you change the path in the <form action=""> part as well.
   
   IMPORTANT: YOU WILL NEED TO CHMOD verify.jpg TO 666 FOR THE SCRIPT TO WORK PROPERLY!

4. If you are writing your own form page, please make sure that you "name" your submit or send button "submit". If you do not do this, your form will not work. This is part of the spam protection and makes sure that your form was actually filled in from your page.

   Example:

   <input type="submit" value="Send form" name="submit" />

   See the name="submit" part? That part MUST be included for the script to work.

   Another thing you must do if you are creating your own form is to include captcha.php (you only need to do this if you require the use of image verification - you should set this preference in nlphpmail.php).

   To do this:

   a) At the VERY START of your form page (which must have a .php extension for this to work), before any HTML or other PHP code, add this line:

   <?php include 'captcha.php'; ?>

   This code must appear before any content on your page, and there must be no whitespace above it. If you aren’t making your own form, make sure that when editing form.php, you start editing beneath that code.

   b) Where you want the image verification to show up, use this code:

   <label for="verifyimage">Enter the letters and numbers you see on this image into the box below:</label><br />
   
   <img src="verify.jpg" alt="CAPTCHA Image" /><br />
   <input type="text" name="verifyimage" id="verifyimage" maxlength="5" />

   You MUST use the <input> tag as written above. If you don’t, you will be unable to send the form. Feel free to change the text and placement of the image around (you cannot change the name of the image, so you must make sure the source of the image is "verify.jpg" and nothing else).

   Please remember that not everyone will be able to use your form if you are using image verification. A lot of people browse with images turned off, or use screen readers which can’t decode the image, or simply can’t see the letters and numbers on the image. Make sure that you have an alternative method for such users to contact you.

   If you aren’t using image verification and are not making your own form, please make sure to delete the parts of code as specified in form.php (there are two parts to delete, make sure you delete both of them). You can then rename your form to .html if you so wish.

   Also, make sure you include the subject line in your form as detailed in step 1 above.

   Please note: If you are using image verification, you will need to refresh the form page if you get an error message (as a new image must be created). Simply pressing "back" on your browser will not be enough. You may wish to tell your visitors in your error messages.
   
   Also, the form will automatically clear itself in some browsers when refreshed for a new image. Please be aware of this if you expect long messages to be sent through your form.

Version History

Version 2.2.1

• Removed name and email address from mail headers in order to increase security and allow sending of mail from strict servers
• Cleared up code, better instructions

Version 2.2

• Changed error handling to a function for easier integration
• General code optimisation
• Improved header injection protection and captcha
• Fixed cleanup function so that entities are no longer escaped in e-mails received

Version 2.1.2:

• Added a few security fixes
• E-mail address is now not required

Version 2.1.1:

• A couple of bug fixes regarding image verification

Version 2.1:

• Added image verification and further HTML validation to example form
• Renamed form from form.html to form.php

Version 2.0:

• Added spam protection measures
• Changed the name of the script from email.php to nlphpmail.php - hopefully spammers won’t be able to find it as easily!
• Fully compatible with register_globals disabled
• Better e-mail verification - protects against spammers using your form to spam others
• form.html is now XHTML 1.1 compliant
• Script sanitizes input properly and is much harder to hack
• Useable with multiple HTML forms! (Yay!)

Version 1.5:

• Changed the script to a zip file download instead of an online tutorial
• Added an example HTML form
• Added a link back button
• Changed the setup of the script, with the variables at the top of the file so it’s easier to edit and set up.

The ReadMe file