Question

My host has a formmail.cgi script to send html form data to emails (http://formmail.dreamhost.com/), but I dont understand how to pass it values that it understands.

Ive tried using this method to pass form values:

HTML:

<form  id="contact_form" action="http://formmail.dreamhost.com/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi" method="POST"> 

 <input type=hidden name="recipient" value="info#raphaelguilleminot.com">
 <input type="hidden" name="subject" value="Message from Raphael's portfolio site" />
 <input type=text id="email" class="email default-value" name="email" value="Your email">
 <label class="error" for="email" id="email_error">your email is required</label> 
 <textarea id="message" class="contact_message default-value" name="message" value="your message">Tell me whats on your mind!</textarea><br/> 
 <input class="submit button" type="submit" value="Send" /> 

</form>

Jquery:

$(".button").click(function() {  

var dataString = 'recipient=info#raphaelguilleminot.com' + 'name='+ name + '&email=' + email + '&message=' + message; 

$.ajax({  
 type: "POST",  
 url: "http://formmail.dreamhost.com/cgi-bin/formmail.cgi",  
 data: dataString,  
 success: function() {  
  $('#contact_form').hide().fadeIn(1500) 
  }  
  });  
  return false;
  });
 }); 

Any ideas?

Answer 1

In order for it not to refresh the page, you need to add
$('#contact_form').submit(function(){ return false; });

One thing I noticed is that you didn’t prefix & for the name attribute, while constructing your own url encoded string is nice, you could use jquery to do it for you automatically.

Set Id’s for each form input, then get the values by using:

msg = $('#message').val();
replyto = $('#email').val();

and for the data section:

data:({
recipient:info#raphaelguilleimnot.com,
subject:'Message from Raphael's portfolio site',
email:replyto,
message:msg
})