I was wondering the same thing.

As a halfway house, I’ve made a contact form Page on Shopify, but, in the HTML, set the form contents to submit to a PHP emailer script which I’ve stored on another server. This all happens invisibly to the user; no pop-ups or anything.

Doubtless there is some disadvantage to this which I haven’t thought of yet.

This here

I think this is what i’m after.

is this just a standard php mailer script.

I didn’t fill the form in but does it return a thankyou page once the form has been posted, if so can you share the script as i can host it elsewhere as well.

lovely site by the way.

Cheers Matt. Once the message is sent, the user is forwarded to another Shopify Page I made, which just says “Email successfully sent� or something.

However, this thread prompted me to do a bit of Googling, and I’ve discovered that the PHP script I was using is insecure (ie. could be harnessed by bots for mass spamming), so I’m going to switch back to a ‘mailto’ until I find a decent one. I’ll stick it up here if I find one.

You may wan’t to take a look at :

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/05/make-powerful-online-forms-easily-with-wufoo/

(haven’t tried, just found the article interesting)

”I’ve discovered that the PHP script I was using is insecure (ie. could be harnessed by bots for mass spamming)”

Kenny,

Can’t you just alter the script so it only accepts posts from URLs containing your shoppify domain name?

Wufoo is very cool and insanely intuitive (if that’s possible). There are several ways to add your form, the simplest being to use the iframe code to add it to a Shopify page from the admin. The forms are very customizable (you can build themes for the forms or use your own CSS) and can show instructions when your visitors hover over the form elements.

Their free plan should work for the majority of Shopify users as long as you don’t expect more than 100 uses of the form per month. Otherwise, there are several pay plans available, which you will be required to have if you want the form to redirect to a custom page on your Shopify store.

cliff, nice post on wufoo. You should add it to the add-on’s list. One question: how are you putting it in shopify, in the pages or in the index.liquid? thanks!

Where is the add-ons list?

You simply past the iframe code in a page via the admin (Blogs and Pages). The rest is done in your Wufoo account.

Cliff, The Add-ons list was a thread I created a while back asking for people to submit add-ons that they were using rather well with shopify. Wufoo is a great one.

As for pasting, I did that, but need to edit the css to fit my page better? Any thoughts on how to best do that?

Though I haven’t had a chance to mess with it much, you can create themes in Wufoo and apply one to your form. It may also be possible to strip the theme and use your own CSS, but I’m not sure.

email me a link of your form. mel(at)penningtonandbailes.com

Hey yep Wufoo is cool I added a form to my store you can see it here:

http://waynesutton.myshopify.com/pages/contact

I also have a way for people to text message me via http://www.txtdrop.com/ which i’m testing out.

Wayne

I’m amazed at how simple it was to put a form in a Shopify page. It was as simple as cut & pasting the typical

I got a little nervous at the beginnig when I first set up a Shopify account. While I’m pretty good at writing up HTML and basic script code, I had never heard of liquid and .css

Turns out it’s really not that complicated once you get down to it!

Wow, never heard of CSS? The use of CSS is a web standard, so I’m glad Shopify is playing a part in educating. Kudos! :)

clifford, never got your email to the form you use, so I figured it out on my own thank goodness. Just used alot of

Sorry, should have said: Just used a lot of

 <span style="css code here">Forms</span>

Sorry, should have said: Just used a lot of

 <span style="css code here">Forms</span>

Hey, Mel, sorry I forgot to reply. My test sites are locked down right now, so I don’t have any links for you. All I did was paste the iframe code to test, I didn’t mess with any of the styling.

You can use CSS classes in pretty much any HTML element.

No other 3rd party services off the top of my head, but I’ll be sure to jot them down if I come across any.

There is also JotForm which I like a lot. It is also free, but it has no limits to the amount of submissions if that is a concern for anyone. They have a nice ajax powered WYSIWYG form builder that lets you completely build and arrange the fields of the form online.

while both of these services are great.

It doesn’t take away the fact that a contact form is basic service of any business online.

After all your customers will want to contact you at some point, and this should be as easy and painless as possible.

And this should be all done within the domain your in.

It could all be managed within the shopify admin area, and alert you when new messages have come in, via email or rss etc.

Beyond this, may be a timing module could be built to raise the profile of questions you have not responded to.

What does everybody think.?

Shopify actually had contact management at one point. i took it out before release because of the myriad of spam problems resulting from such forms.

I really don’t want to add captchas or stuff like this to shopify stores so i nixed the idea till we have a good idea of what we need in shopify.

For the record: the contact form on jadedpixel.com gets a spam message every once every 5 minutes. The comments on my personal weblog at blog.leetsoft.com about one in every 10 seconds.

Forms on the internet are bad these days i’m afrait to say..

agreed with that,

and i was hinting at a very basic cms type system, i’ve had the mis-pleasure to implement rightnow at work, so that was the kind of thing i was thinking.

I lurk on the texpattern / texdrive forums and the guys over there face the same issue’s with spam and forms, although i’m sure somebody put together a form that was meant to stop the automated type spam, but i could be wrong.

In the end i’m sure you guys will figure something out.

Hey, Tobi, I don’t know if this will help at all, but with my contact forms I’ve been in the habit of adding a checkbox that reads “this is not spam” and must be checked in order to send the message. I only get maybe 1 spam every 2 weeks now because it takes a human being to check that box. So far at least. :)

Ha ha. Well thats a cute way to do it.

Since we are talking about this, my personal favorite is kitten auth

Nice, Natalie, that is a cool way to do it. Way more interesting than the enter-these-psychedelic-numbers-in-the-box. ;)

Toby, Do your forms require an email address? And do you authenticate the address before allowing people to send the form?

They do require an email address but they don’t verify. You mean we should send a test email to the people using the form and only unlocking the feedback if this is confirmed successfully?

Just came across another option called The Form Assembly for building contact forms, etc. The service is apparently free.

Tobi, Not exactly. What you do is write a script that does a lookup of the mx record for the domain in the email address, connect to mail server and verify that the address exists. This is what the transaction between the server looks like from a telnet session.

The lines with stars are the ones that I typed, everything else is what the server responded with.

What we are looking for is the 250 OK after typing in the “RCPT TO <>”.

* Rotten-Apple:~ dan$ telnet mailserver.jadedpixel.com 25
Trying 204.11.49.158...
Connected to mailserver.jadedpixel.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mailserver.jadedpixel.com ESMTP Postfix (Debian/GNU)
* EHLO jadedpixel.com
250-mailserver.jadedpixel.com
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 10240000
250-VRFY
250-ETRN
250 8BITMIME
* MAIL FROM:<myemail@mydomain.com>
250 Ok
* RCPT TO:<postmaster@jadedpixel.com>
250 Ok
* RSET
250 Ok
* QUIT
221 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.
Rotten-Apple:~ dan$ 

I do have to mention that it will not return an error if the email address does not exist on the server. But this does show that there is a valid email address set up for the domain name which most spam does not have. The addresses used in spam are most of the time made up and do not really exist.

grrrrr. I meant to say valid email server.. Where is the edit button??!? ;)

Ok. Let me set this straight.

If the mail server has a catch-all address for a domain, an invalid user in an email address will not give an error. On the other hand if there is no catch-all address, the server should give a 550 error(user not known)

So recap. You could do 3 checks: 1. That the email address is in a valid format. 2. That the domain name exists(lookup returns mx record) 3. That the username exists on the server (optional)

As for your personal blog. You could even go as far as keeping the email addresses that validate in a database and verify against that first. This would keep down on the traffic generated in validating the email addresses of returning posters.

Just don’t let that list get in the hands of a spammer :D

Bump – Is this feature something that we might see in the future?

While third party solutions and iframes work, its not feasable to be maintaining multiple logins in multiple places to have certain features.

I am seeing this with contact forms, reviews and image hosting.

I understand your busy and these things take time, but it would be nice to know what we can expect in the future updates.

I have to bump this as well there are plenty of ways to have a contact form that circumvents spammers. This is a nesessity on any web store. It is also pretty basic. I run textpattern and get no spam at all through my contact form and maybe 2 per week in comment forms.

If you’ve got a web server running PHP it’s VERY simple to set up a web for that’ll work.

About 15 lines of code.

If you’ve got a web server running PHP it’s VERY simple to set up a web for that’ll work.

I thought one of the main benefits of having a hosted e-commerce site was supposed to be that you didn’t need your own server?

I agree with other commenters that a contact form is pretty much a “must have” for an online store. While anti-spam measures are definitely helpful, it should be noted that the presence of spam doesn’t actually affect the user experience of the customers, only the store owner. This could be considered “the price you have to pay” for making it as easier for your customers to contact you. Of course, the shopify admins do have to consider the extra load on their email system that spam would introduce.

I have one set up but it is sort of a pain to have to deal with that externally, especially for clients who I don’t want to have to alias part of their domain to one of my servers just for a contact form. It should be handled in withing the server the application is on for ease of use for me as a designer and clients as users. When the sales start booming on stores and commission checks get larger there will be more grumbling over the need for something basic like a simple contact form.

tobi,

Here is a link I found that references the live check of email address. There is a download for a plugin for phpbb so maybe you can reference it.

here is the link

hope this helps.

I have been playing around which actually connecting to the referenced mail server and asking it if its a valid email address. this seems pretty promising as psydo spam protection. Its pretty complicated however because you have to ask the DNS server of the domain for a MX record and then handle the case where there is no MX record and so on.

There is also the wonderful services at http://akismet.com/ but they don’t really deal with feedback style posts.

I use a plugin for textpattern that was made by Alex Shields one of the devs. I have yet to get any spam through his contact form. I know you know your stuff, but If you would like to have a look let me know. Its only about 20 lines of code that handles the mail check requirements.

Hi Tobi,

I would say if they don’t have an mx record then have it fail. A valid email server should always have a mx record maybe 2.

That should make it easy anyway!!! ;)

Dan

Just compared two external services: Wufoo and the FormAssembly, and found the latter to be far better.

Wufoo:

• very slow; I click on my contact page, and it takes around 30 seconds for the form to appear from their server, by which time most people will have given up.

• no internationalization: if your site is in anything but English, it’ll be annoying to see buttons that says “submit”

• invalid markup: iframes are not on in XHTML Strict; I don’t know about transitional.

FormAssembly:

• you can choose to host the form yourself (in the shopify application), so it’s much quicker to load, and remains in your domain.

• as it’s not an iframe, it’s more complex to install; you have to download the files and put them in their proper places.

• once you’ve done that, another problem is that their css (which you can modify) will affect all the other form elements in your site, so there’s quite a bit of customization and separating of parameters to do. There are also some, more minor, validation problems.

• with these caveats, the rest seems excellent: verification for proper email format (which Wufoo doesn’t seem to have), internationalization – you specify your language. you can have auto reply from your shopify address, get notified about incoming comments by email, etc.

With both these services, however, I would only take the paid services, because with the free option, once your customer has left a comment, s/he gets taken to an advertisement page of wufoo/formassembly, and that, in my view, is a Bad Thing.

“invalid markup: iframes are not on in XHTML Strict; I don’t know about transitional.”

They’re in the xhtml 1.0 frameset doctype.

- Rich

They’re in the xhtml 1.0 frameset doctype.

They still suck for a comment form though :) and woofoo is about the most painfully slow external script I have ever used.

If anyone’s got a server with PHP I’m happy to email them my form script, as used here:

http://shop.thepasty.com/pages/mailing-list

If not I can host the script for you for a small fee.

Rich
The Pasty.com – RichardQuickDesign.com

soz – link is: http://shop.thepasty.com/pages/mailing-list

It’s not really the mail list, for me any way. I’m using campaign monitor which is really nice, because your subscribers are automgically loaded into your account when the fill in those fields. i am using woofoo ug for a contact form that is so slow. I have a few servers, but I am not sure of a good contact php script to refer to, so if you have any hint there it would be much nicer (and faster) than woofoo and the silly iframe they use.

Jamie – all my script does is processes the form fields and posts them to you as an email.

Can be a contact form, mailing list or anything else.

If you want it drop me an email

info@ my site.

- Rich

Jamie -

I’ve just looked at campaign monitor, & looks useful. Do you use it to let people sign up for a newsletter? And if so, how do you capture the customer data (i.e. the e-mail addresses from the contact form) into campaign monitor? In other words, how do you link c.m. to shopify?

@ Christina,

I have a bit of a snippet that CM gives me. I simply drop it in a div an put it where I think it ought to go. When the user hits “submit” it posts to the CM account or specific campaign that the form was tailored for. It’s quite simple and the nice thing about CM is that it’s pay per send rather than monthly service fee whether you mail or not. Check it out. Free sign up. What I did to keep it simple for this client is we have a page for the newsletter within shopify- she updates the text/images on that page and CM downloads the generated html and images to create the html based email, so I don’t have to code something every time she wants to email out a newsletter and my client feels a bit more empowered by it.

@ Richard I’ll email you on the script. That sounds much more promising than woofoo. Thanks!

so tobi,

hows the contact form lobby coming along anyway? :)

Many thanks for the explanation, Jamie. I’ll try that.

Many many months later… do we still have no offering?

I am 100% with ‘fake monkey’. This is absolutely essential to any online shop.

Heck, you guys already have the code written. You use a very readable captcha-like thing for this forum’s registration form!

:(

I’ve been very happy with Jotform. It is free and they just upgraded it last week, I think they added a captcha options. I get a lot of fake submissions, but not from bots, just people being jerks.

-Jared

What are you specifying at JotForm for HeaderURL and such? I can’t find a good way to integrate the source for a form.

Bump.

Any progress on this at all Tobi? I realize that it appears fairly complicated, but it’s generally fairly standard and essential these days.

The work-arounds are definitely there, but far too complex and involved for most of us, regardless an implemented process would be far superior.

Something that allowed for customization of the fields. For example, I’m starting a clothing store, maybe I’d like a field that allowed the user to input their size or favorite apparel company, etc.

Thanks!

One really simple way to use a contact form and not get blotto’d with Spam, is to present the form with a <div> container that contains a message like ” if you want to contact us, please click here”. a click on the container removes it and enables the contact form to be filled in. Assign it to cart.notes (or with cart.attributes if you must use other fields to capture info).. and you’re done… it would be pretty hard for a spam bot to click that div away…

same principle would protect Jotspot and Wufoo iframes too..

If you need help with this, drop me a line.. I can set you up…

Hey Hunky,

You’re just the person I’ve been looking for.

Can you drop me an e-mail at autophileapparel(AT)gmail.com?

I’d like to ask you how you implemented a color choice option in your cart!

Thanks!

P.S. – I believe I have the contact issue solved for now!

Hunky could you explain further? If it is a <div> container how would it be hiding the contained form markup from non-visually oriented bots? Is the form created entirely with Javascript after the <div> is clicked? That seems to bring up accessabilty problems, for humans.

Hi,

First of all, let’s make the assumption that your form exists in your template. You made it, you hooked it up to the Shopify back end via cart.note and cart.attributes. You want to cut down on spam bots right? Using javascript (the only way to manipulate the DOM nodes that make up your clients view of the site), you can make a <div> which serves as a clickable container. As long as you have not registered a click in that container, there is no submit button for the form. If a click is registered in the container, voila, you provide the submit element.

In terms of programming skills required for this, with Shopify’s pedigree in Rails it comes with Protocrapulous for free, where you can easily manipulate the DOM with built in helper functions galore.

As for usability problems for humans… once again, I appreciate the effort being made for those who choose to turn off javascript… and to those who do, hurrah for you, you might get the basic, simple, Shopify site, no bells, no whistles and perhaps no contact form. It’s their choice.

It the site owner’s choice to decide whether accepting and processing hundreds or more spam bot hits per day/week/month is worth it in the end.

Captcha’s were really rare for awhile there too, but you notice how now that they are so trendy and common, they seem to be more of a pain than ever to deal with. This is more like one mouse click (keyboard hit) goodness.

In fact, you could just map a weirdo key stroke combination to your form, so that it only submits if the user presses <shift>+<g>+<o> or something benign to invoke the submit. Skies the limit…

interesting is that any protective “hack” like that one via javascript can be circunvented by a spammer, by implementing a system as this control still resides on client. captchas do precisely that, they take control off the client, you can post, but the verification happens in an uncontrolled environment for the spammer (server). you dont need a submit button to “submit” a form, that is just one of the ways a client application gives to send a post/get, you can either use javascript, a browser plugin, or a custom spamming application for that.

also, spam bots can effectively click regions and trigger javascript, completely invalidating the protection.

Just thought I’d bump this up!

I think I’m probably going to use a script hosted elsewhere, that seems to be the best solution at the moment.

Wufoo is pretty nice though, although I don’t really like the fact it’s branded (I know, I can probably change that if I wanted to pay for it).

Try this…

http://formspring.com

I think Im about to switch to yahoo stores!

It seems that allot of the basic functionality you would expect from a product you are paying money for and then also giving a percentage of your sales to would have basic functionality like this…

I have had to delay marketing my store because of some of these basic features that are included with virtually every other hosted ecommerce solution are a royal pain in the but to implement unless you can code it yourself….

Phil

Hi Phil. Curiously, are you a web professional or a business person? If you’re only a business person, do you act as your own attorney for legal advise as well? If your having many troubles getting setup, perhaps it’d be worth the money to hire somebody with e-commerce, development, and Shopify experience?

I only mention this because I’ve read your posts on this forum and get the impression that you want to fully customize your site, but may not have the skills to do so. Shopify is intended not to be “bloatware” and has the right features for the majority of shops, but doesn’t provide features that only a few need.

That’s what makes Shopify a great product – it’s easy to use and gets the job done for most people. Just like any product on the market, it’s not going to be the perfect solution for everybody, but I’ve yet to find a better e-commerce solution than this. Something about Shopify attracted you, right?

Anyhow, over the past months these forums have turned into something of a public “gripe-board”. If you like bloatware, Shopify isn’t for you, but if you want something that is easy to use, looks great, and has everything you need to get the job done, you’ll love Shopify.

Shopify provides you the tools and features to sign-up, fill in some basic information, and you have a nice looking shop. If you want to extend Shopify to its limits (which is really fun), then perhaps you should hire somebody or give yourself more time to learn it. Between Shopify’s API, some Liquid expertise, and a great imagination, Shopify is capable of doing anything you want.

I personally love Shopify because it is one of the most flexible systems out there – both from a design and development perspective.

Anywho, good luck with your shop!

Hi Jared,

Thanks for your reply.. I am actually fairly happy with shopify, but I do wish that there were more features built in to it. I see allot of post’s asking for help and a lot of replies saying to hire someone, which is kind of frustrating.

I am not by any sense of the word a web developer, I know just enough about a few other languages to get the flow and do some basic modification to the site, but obviously not enough to accomplish my goals. I have tried to find more information about liquid, but there just doesnt seem to be a whole lot out there at this point.. I would love to have a better understanding of the language so that I dont have to bother anyone with my silly problems and to help out some of those people like myself who just need a pointer or two in the right direction.

Thanks again for taking time to reply to my gripe :-)
Phil

ps. is there a way to subscribe to threads so that Ill know if someone replies to something I have posted?

— Last edited 03:22PM, Aug 02, 2008

Hi again Phil. When replying to comments in this forum I don’t immediately suggest going out and hiring somebody, but I do consider one’s skill set when making that recommendation.

The great thing about Shopify that somebody with NO web knowledge can create an online store then run it quite easily. I think what misleads people is they think because they were able get online fairly easily that they will also be able to become a professional front-end developer (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Liquid) overnight as well.

Since Shopify gives full control over design, that means if you want to customize a default theme then you’ll need to know how to write XHTML, CSS, and Liquid. It takes many people years to excel at this so to assume that a typical business person can do this immediately is just silly. This is why you see people suggesting they hire somebody. To a trained eye it’s obvious when somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing.

As a web professional I love Shopify because I do have full range of control over the look, feel, and functionality. People who aren’t web pros are the ones you see complaining in these forums. In many cases it’s because they just don’t have the skills to make something work properly, not because a feature is missing.

Anyhow, because I have years of development experience I was able to learn Liquid in a matter of a few hours simply by using the Shopify Wiki. Since I’ve been working with Shopify since its inception I’m typically able to develop a complete theme in a few hours depending on the complexity these days.

You can subscribe to this forum by clicking the RSS button on the top of the forums homepage.

Good luck with your shop!

I’ve made a contact form Page on Shopify, and in the HTML, I attempted to set the form contents to submit to a PHP emailer script and I thought I might be able to make work by uploading the script as an asset…can anybody tell me if I am on the right track with that approach?

You can’t upload a PHP script to your assets and execute it. Shopify doesn’t even have PHP enabled servers. You need to submit the form to another server that is PHP enabled and can actually do something with the data to submit.

You might be better of using something like Formspring.

Hi Jared,

This is one of the things that concerns me slightly about Shopify – how I’d be able to integrate dynamic content or includes from the same or another server (like an image gallery) into my template?

Normally, I’d use a PHP script, but are there other alternatives to generating this type of content in templates? Am I right in thinking this is where I’d need to learn liquid?

Many thanks,

osu

— Last edited 08:42AM, Sep 05, 2008

Liquid is not a programming language, it is a template language that enables you to place Shopify variables on the page with minimum logic.

Maybe you can use iframe to place dynamic content on the page generated by a PHP script hosted on another server.

Or you can use JavaScript/AJAX to add content to the document (the DOM), again using an Ajax URL to a PHP script hosted somewhere else.

So, yes, it is possible to add dynamic content on the page, in the way that you allude to, but not using Liquid per say.

If you have a Drupal site hosted somewhere, you can install the webform contributed module to it (that’s a Drupal add-on), create any number of webforms and iframe them on your Shopify site on any page you want.

To iframe the form without all the Drupal page ‘chrome’ (header, sidebars and footer) you can use a special page template.

I created a Drupal module that generates such template for all pages displaying a webform, and I explained my method here.

— Last edited 10:59AM, Sep 05, 2008

@osu Dynamic scripts that are not client side ie. javascript will all have to be executed somewhere else. I have a flash/xml gallery running on someones site, but the calls are going to another sever that I have elsewhere. Same for contact forms. But for a medium trafficked site it almaost makes more sense to use something like jotform, wufoo, or formspring until (if/when jp implements) there is a simple contact form function within shopify.

Regarding Forms, I have been very happy with www.Formlogix.com. You can easily and fully customize a form and paste the automatically generated code into your Shopify page. The cost for me is about a $1 a month. You can check out one of my contact forms here…

http://www.customframesolutions.com/pages/contact-us

Regarding hiring someone for customizing your site, I can tell you that about a year ago, I had no idea how to do HTML and did not know what CSS was. I didn’t hire anyone though, I did a lot of searches on google for tutorials and chipped away at my ignorance regarding web design and in less than 4 months, I had fully designed http://www.canvastree.com. Earlier this year, I built http://www.customframesolutions.com in a little over a month.

I’m a big fan of learning how to do things yourself. I do draw the line though at certain things like javascript coding for enhanced customization as you can see on the product pages of the Custom Frame Solutions site. For that I went with HunkyBill, who did a ton of work in about a day and a half.

-Housh

Let me add my vote for JotForm; implemented very quickly yesterday and fully meeting my needs for newsletter signup and trade enquiries.

Jonathan

I use JotForm as well, it is superb. The good news is – it is free if u receive less than 100 enquiries per month.

Is their a free captcha, Olu?

The 100 enquiries per month, do they include spam?

Personally I like to use http://zoho.com

Their database creator is really sweet. I use it for businesses that need to upload businesses or logos.

Besides sending the inputed info via email, it can also be exported later by excel or pdf.

Zoho actually has a lot of really great tools for free.

Here is an example of one used in Shopify.

http://www.ridgewaycorp.com/pages/about-us

I like Jotform too; here it is in use on our site:

http://sleepysheep.ca/pages/contact-us

— Last edited Today, 03:41AM