WEB: Webfusion - what no sendmail?

If you are considering a new web host and want to include any sort of 'contact us' form on your site, my advice would be to steer clear of Webfusion.co.uk.
Unfortunately they have taken the ill advised step of not supporting sendmail. This means there is no real way (other than with ASP pages) of being able to code and configure a simple 'contact us' form for your site.

Instead they support 'intmail' (rather than 'localhost') and require authentication with a valid username and password. I didn't even have any joy configuring tectite to work with PEAR PHP settings.

If you know ASP it won't be a problem but if you don't and you want to use something like tectite to easily build your form you are out of luck...

TECH: An easy 'contact us' script for websites

A lot of folk want a simple 'contact us' form for their website. Historically there have been lots of relatively simple CGI scripts that could handle this such as FormMail.pl. However, these have two problems nowadays. Firstly, they are far more complicated than they need to be (the eyes of many novice web masters glaze over when you tell them to make sure they CHMOD the script to 755, check the path to Perl, upload the files in ASCII etc). Secondly they lack security, their functionality is often easily by-passed and many web hosts won't allow such scripts to run as they have been used to send spam etc

The solution: head over to www.tectite.com.
They have a simple step by step interface that makes you a FREE custom PHP script that you can simply upload to your website. Ah, if only everything in web design were so simple. If you like the script, make sure you send those folks some money. It's a great tool and means you can literally just upload the script to whatever directory your HTML page is and Voila - fully working form. You can see it working on my 'contact' page at benfrain.com

Note: Virtually all hosting companies support PHP. If you want to test if your host server has PHP installed, simply Open a text editor and type in the following:

<?

phpinfo();

?>




and save it as phpinfo.php

Now upload this to your webspace and go to it in your browser. If you have PHP installed you will see a page with all the details of your PHP installation on it. If you find a section about MySQL then you will know that MySQL is also installed.