PHP Scripts Free How To

Simple Email Capture Form in PHP

There are so many ways to handle forms in PHP, but in my experience, the simplest way for inexperienced PHP coders to understand it, is to simply send an email. If your website does not have a lot of traffic, you may want the form data sent to your regular email address. If you are pretty popular, you may want to set up a special account to handle the form data, and you can do a lot of things with this special account, but that is the subject for another type of post and/or website!

You can see a demo of my email capture form here. Yes, it is ugly. I needed to keep the form simple, so it would be easier to understand the basics. But you can take it from there. You can add CSS or html tags to change the headings, style, text color, fonts, etc. There is beauty in simplicity my friends.

How To Make Your Own Email Capture Form

I tried to make this as simple as possible for all of us. You can add comments to this post if you have questions or suggestions.

• Download the text file here – Email Capture Form Download.
• CHANGE the suffix from .txt to .php! So your new file should be called emailcapture.php!
• EDIT 2 Variables at the top – $toemail and $pagetitle (To Email and Page Title). These will set the email you want the form data sent to, AND the title and heading of your own page.
• At the bottom of the script, you will see some text that is outputted with the PHP echo function. That is what appears on the RIGHT side of the page. You shold change this to match your own website.
• Upload the script to your own server that has PHP enabled (almost all of them do). Test it out, and start grabbing emails, comments, etc.
• Important – I do ask you to leave the link back to this website at the bottom of the form in exchange for giving you this free code. Also, please leave the copyright info in the actual script. It is only polite, and it allows me to hand out free code. If you just cannot do this, please contact me (with our comment form) or go pay somebody else to code you a form. If I customize your form, I will either charge you or ask for barter (in the form of backlinks).
• You are certainly free to change this code to suit your own needs. You can store the emails in a file or database, add custom fields, etc. But again, please leave the link and copyright intact unless you have permission to remove it.

Questions About the Simple PHP Email Capture Form?

Please register and leave your comments and questions. I will try to attend to them as quickly as possible.

Can you Profit by Giving It Away?

If you have been doing any development online, you probably know that you can find lots of free software and software tools online. So how do the companies who produce this software, and then just give it away, make any money? I would like to explore some free software business models that have produced large profits for their companies. I got inspired for this article here.

Offer a Free License with Paid Upgrades

This can be done in more than one way. You have heard of shareware, right. Here are some ways that freeware or shareware make money for developers.

• The software expires after a term, and only a paid upgrade can unlock it. This gives potential customers the ability to try the scripts out. If customers get used to software, and find that it helps them, they will be very warmed up for an upsell.
• The software works forever as a free version, but the paid version has more features. Again, if potential clients like the software, but wish it had a few more bells and whistles, they will be open to the idea of paying for an upgrade.

Offer Paid Support For Totally Free Software

Many companies, like MYSQL and Wordpress developers, offer free and useful software that is absolutely free. But many companies do not have the expertise to use these tools, and they will be willing to pay for consulting and support.

Use the Free Software to Draw Traffic to a Website

This model, used by many free script websites, means that the developers or promoters, will never profit from selling any software. But they may also have discussion forums or a constant stream of new updates that will keep visitors coming back. In addition to the free software they provide for download, they probably have advertisers who will pay (in one way or another) to be promoted on the website.

Offer the Software in Exchange for Links Back to Another Website

In the internet business, website visitors (traffic) equals money for most of us. Think of the example of Free Wordpress Themes. Some are very good, and good probably be sold for a lot of money. But the developers do not sell the software, but just insist that users must leave the links intact.

The links may be fairly small, and set at the bottom of the page. The developers of these free scripts do not expect that many internet browsers to actually click the links, but hope that the links pass on “link juice” that will make them more popular with major search engines.

Have a Donation Box

Services like Paypal make it very simple to add a donation box. And users do donate. I know that I have donated money to the developers of free Wordpress plugins, especially if they have some built-in nagging tactics. If I find a plugin useful, I certainly don’t mind passing on some cash to the developer!

Do You Have More Ideas to Profit with Free Software?

We’d love to see your comments, and we will approve the good ones. Simply register for this site and post away. You are free to leave useful and legitimate links back to your appropriate websites!

What’s Wrong with Notepad or Textpad for Script Edits?

Well, there is nothing really wrong with using any plain text editor to write and edit PHP code. However, if you do this, you probably know why it is not the easiest way to get things done.

• Plain text editors do not give you line numbers. When your syntax check says you have an unexpected ; on line 32, it can be hard to figure out what line 32 is.
• If you have nested code, like brackets that need to be paired, it can be very easy to lose track of them. If you haven’t kept everything perfectly aligned, it can use up a lot of time to comb back through your code to find out where you messed up.
• It is also easy to make a typo and spell a function name wrong, or to mismatch quotes.
• With a plain text editor like notepad, everything will be displayed with the same text face. Nothing will be bolded or highlighted or printed in a different color.

Get a Free Source Code Editor

A source code editor like this one: Free download of Notepad++ does a lot of things for a coder! It provides line numbers that will be the same as the line numbers your syntax checker produces. It also helps you line up your brackets with a thin verticle line and the ability to “minus” out of a block of code.

In addition, functions, constants, and variables will be highlighted with different faces so it makes it much easier to spot errors.  Notepad++ is free to download, and it is very simple to use. Besides, PHP, it also supports HTML plus many of other programming languages.

If simple code debugging is taking up a lot of your time, and you are still using a plain text editor, you really don’t have any reason to delay getting a PHP source code editor.

If you are a beginner, you will find yourself able to spot errors faster with time, but a source code editor can make your task easier if you are a newbie or an old hand with PHP.

Handly Online PHP Syntax Checker

Have you ever wanted to run through your code to check it for syntax errors, but did not want to have to keep uploading the file to your server in order to do this? Since I only have PHP installed on my server, and not on my local PC, I know this would be handy for me!

If you are like me, you spend some time looking for typos and syntax errors after you have developed a new script.

In addition, not all servers are configured to show syntax errors, and so a code error will just give you a blank screen. This can be very frustrating if you are trying to find a misplaced quote or bracket in several lines of code.

I was very happy to find this free PHP syntax tool.

You can simply visit that page, upload your PHP file from your own computer’s hardrive, and then click the “Check This File” button. Or if you would rather, they even let you download their script and install it on your own PHP server.