From time to time, I am asked whether it is possible to put multiple copies of the contact form created by the Free Feedback Form Wizard on a single website. This article shows you how to do this.
The reasons why anyone would want more than one feedback form on a single website vary from person to person. Very often, it is because the webmaster has a site with different sections run by different people. As such, it makes sense to have a separate feedback form for each of these people.
If your website is a solo endeavour, where you're the only person your visitor needs to contact to get anything done, you don't need to read this article. Instead, go to one of the following tutorials to learn how to add a feedback form to your website.
(Just choose the one matching the web editor that you're using to create your website.)
For those who have just arrived at thesitewizard.com, and don't actually have a website yet, I recommend that you start by reading the How to Start / Make Your Own Website. The guide takes you through all the steps of creating a fully functional website, including your own feedback form.
The basic idea is to create a separate folder for each feedback form you need. If you want to see a live example of one way to do this, you can take a look at how I manage it with my feedback form demos, where I have a demo form for each of the different types available.
To be exact, the folder structure for the 4 types of demo feedback forms (at the time this was written) is as follows:
The Standard Feedback Form Demo
https://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-standard/index.htmlhttps://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-standard/thankyou.htmlhttps://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-standard/error.htmlThe Feedback Form with hCaptcha
https://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-hcaptcha/index.htmlhttps://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-hcaptcha/thankyou.htmlhttps://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-hcaptcha/error.htmlThe Feedback Form with ReCAPTCHA
https://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-recaptcha/index.htmlhttps://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-recaptcha/thankyou.htmlhttps://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-recaptcha/error.htmlThe Feedback Form with the invisible ReCAPTCHA
https://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-invisible/index.htmlhttps://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-invisible/thankyou.htmlhttps://www.thesitewizard.com/demos/feedback-invisible/error.htmlNotice that the standard form has its own set of pages, form page, thank you page and error page, all contained in the "feedback-standard" folder. Likewise, the set of pages for each of the other types of form is separate and distinct, and placed in its own folder ("feedback-hcaptcha", "feedback-recaptcha", etc) as well.
You are not restricted to having only 4 sets of forms of course. You can always create a new set of form.html, thankyou.html
and error.html (or whatever filenames you prefer) for every person you want linked to from your website. For example, you can make it
such that Tom can be reached from www.example.com/tom/form.html, Dick from www.example.com/dick/form.html and
Harry www.example.com/harry/form.html. And so on.
Two very important things to note about this method:
You must return to the Feedback Form Wizard and generate a separate script for each of the different people. You CANNOT generate the script once and dump the same script into different directories and expect it to work the way you want. This is because the wizard embeds the email address and the web addresses for the form, thank you page and error pages directly into the script and form. If you simply copy the same script into a separate folder, the copy in the new folder will still send the message to the original email address and invoke the old Thank You and Error pages.
You must put each form and script in its own separate directory. You cannot dump all the forms and scripts into
the same directory, otherwise all the forms will invoke the same script to send your mail. That is to say, no matter
what you name your error and thank you pages, the script is always called feedback.php. If you put everything
into the same directory, the latest version of the feedback.php that you generate will overwrite the earlier.
An example will, hopefully, make it clearer. Let's say you want to create 2 sets of forms, one for Tom and one for Harry. For the first form, go to the form wizard and enter:
tom@example.comhttp://www.example.com/tom/form.htmlhttp://www.example.com/tom/thankyou.htmlhttp://www.example.com/tom/error.html
When the wizard returns its results with the form code and script, use the code and script generated for you in the usual way
to create the pages in Tom's directory at www.example.com/tom/. (If you don't know what "the usual way" is, please
read the tutorials given in the first
section of this article, above.)
Now for Harry's form, return to the form wizard and enter:
harry@example.comhttp://www.example.com/harry/form.htmlhttp://www.example.com/harry/thankyou.htmlhttp://www.example.com/harry/error.htmlNotice that every single entry is different from Tom's, that is, not just the email address, but the web addresses as well.
Use the code created by the Wizard to create Harry's form and script. Let me say that again. You have to use the new code generated by the wizard for the form and script. Don't reuse Tom's script. Don't reuse Tom's web page containing the form.
(You can reuse the content of the "Thank You" and "Error" pages if you want.)
I know I am saying the same thing over and over again in different ways. But this is because reusing the old script and putting everything into the same directory are two of the most common errors visitors make when they carry out the above procedure. So don't take shortcuts, or your forms won't work as intended.
If you want the script to send your visitors to the same Thank You and Error pages no matter which form on your site they use, simply enter the same web address (URL) for those pages each time you create a new form and script.
Again, note that this only applies to the Thank You and Error pages. You must have a different URL for the feedback form page.
If you have different people for visitors to contact, it's a simple thing to make the name of each person a clickable link pointing to a different form. For example, I have made the following link, Christopher, point to thesitewizard.com's feedback form. Basically, it's the same as creating a link to any other web page on the Internet. The method to do this vary depending on which web editor you use. For example, here are some tutorials for the common web editors:
As you can see, the process for using multiple feedback forms on one site is not complicated. The feedback form wizard handles all the programming wizardry for you, so all you need to do is to place the results in different folders.
Copyright © 2009-2024 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
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How to Put Multiple Feedback Forms on One Website
