Coldfusion Madness!!!!

Hey All, I know nothing about Coldfusion. . . lol But I seem to know a little bit about everything regarding web languages. . . just enough to make me dangerous. Anyways, here are my 2 problems.

The website in question is www.groundwire.net.

1. If you go to www.groundwire.net and on the right hand side input information for the newsletter sign up and then click go, it takes you to another page called www.groundwire.net/newsletter.cfm and you have to re-put in all your information. However, upon signing up, everything works just fine and we receive the information.

Now, if you go to www.groundwire.net/index2.htm and do the same thing, I set it up so that upon clicking go from the home page newsletter sign up it takes you to www.groundwire.net/newsletter2.cfm.

Now the only change I've made to this page is in bold below:

<CFINPUT type="text" value="#form.name#"name="name" required="yes" message="Please enter your name.">

<CFINPUT type="text" value="#form.email#" name="email" validate="email" required="yes" message="Please enter a valid email address.">

In hopes that it would autofill that portion of the form out, the name and email address. However, when I sign up, I get an error. So not sure what's causing the error or how to fix it.

The second issue I'm having is when anyone fills out the contact form at www.groundwire.net/contact.cfm it takes them to an old thank you page, how do I customize it with a new thank you page, and also, if you scroll down on the old thank you page, it shows a coldfusion error that I am unsure of and unable to explain.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

The name of the email text box is "password". That's why you're getting the error " Element EMAIL is undefined in FORM" on the action page. Just change the text box name to to "email".

<input type="text" name="password" class="txtbox" />

What is the code you're using to take them to the "thank you" page?

A checkbox element will not exist on the action page unless it was checked. To prevent that error, either use IsDefined

<cfif IsDefined("form.checkboxes")>
    (Do something with the values here)
<cfelse>
    Sorry. None of the boxes were checked
</cfif>

Code (markup):

Or use <cfparam> at the top of your page to define a default value when none of the boxes were checked. The default value can be anything you want.

   <cfparam name="form.checkboxes" default="" >

Code (markup):

 

Hi,
It looks to me like you have attempted to put right some of the problems you are having. I have a couple of observations that might help.

1. Make it easy for visitors to register, you display login boxes but theres no 'Register Here' link. The go button seems to do that job instead which is confusing. Keep these operations separate. If a user cant login on this page dont fudge it. Just provide clear links to the registration page.

2. You are not validating your forms. You are using Dreamweaver, its has form validation behaviours if you dont want to use Coldfusion (CFFORM) tags or other jscripts.

3. Arm yourself with a good book. ColdfusionMX Bible for example.

Your thank you page should be the last action after the form has been submitted and the database updated. ie

<CFIF IsDefined form.submit>
<!--- form has beeen submitted --->
...database insert action here
<!--- last action --->
<cflocation url="thanks.cfm">
<CFELSE>
the form goes here
</CFIF>

 

thank you very much starlight, you did find the problem, I appreciate it very much! I was able to figure out the thank you page by just finding the action="" command and pointing it to the correct url which I then created.

Bruhol, I appreciate your help and feedback very much. However, I recreated the "go" button as per your suggestion which can be seen on the groundwire.net/about.htm page, but for some reason the words look very poorly done. When I create the graphic in photoshop the text looks great, but when I put it in place of the go graphic it looks all distorted. I didn't bother working on adjusting the placement of where it is at because of how distorted it looked in the first place, does that make sense? Any suggestions as to why it looks that way?

 

You're very welcome. Don't forget bruhol's suggestion about validation. Its a good idea

 

Hello again,
Yes I agree your about page registration button image is a bit naff. However the butoon convention used elswhere is fine. Did you not create thewe links then ?

Tips for creating buttons.
In photoshop you can choose the crispness of the font use that to make the font smooth, you can then place a pill shape block on a lower layer and apply a bevel style to that then add colour fill and glassiness etc.

Alternatively you can use dreamweaver to create a flash button. I sometimes do this but the put the flash button on a blasnk page to do a screen capture of that and crop out the image and save the result to a gif.

Similarly you could screen capture you 'More' button image or get at the file from your css image directory....

Tute: 'google' photoshop glassy buttons fopr an excellent tute