We use a form processor for forms in webflow that works really well. Advantages to this is if you ever leave webflow your website forms don’t break. Also not having to rely on a third party to process the forms or issues in not receiving form data, or any limitations on number of forms received and potential associated costs, etc.
In case it helps I am making this post to give instructions on what we use and how it works.
The form processor script we use is formmail.php found at www.tectite.com. Totally free, although they have some paid service whereby you can use their wizard to build forms but we don’t use it or need it and you really shouldn’t either as the script will do everything you need. Too, bears mentioning you can rename this form to whatever you want.
Important thing is to configure the script for the particular form/website and that is pretty easy to do generally there are only a couple of lines in the script that need modified.
In particular around line 442 of the script is the $target_email. In between the quotes you’d put the domain url without www or anything just like “domain.com”
The next line “def_alert” is if you the developer or someone needing to track anything technical from the form responses needs such data then you’d put your or their email in between the quotes there. Then you will get an email when/if a form is submitted and there are any problems (errors) or for example when/if the form script itself needs updated as in using an older version.
The only other thing we will change in the form is at or around line 468 called “$at_mangle”. there we will put something funky in between the quotes like “&george@”. This fools spammers and is totally cool and so much fun to do.
Works like this. When you build your form you have to make a hidden value for the email address the form is going to be emailed to. Problem is spammers can scrape this. But now with this feature let us say your email address is email@email.com. Now you would make it (in the case like our at_mangle shown above) email&george@email.com. Of course, there is no email&george email address so it will kick back assuming you have your server email system setup correctly to fail if an invalid email address is used. And spammers cannot see or know the real email address.
Then all you have to do is upload that formmail.php file to the root directory where the webpage files are.
Now in your webflow form block you simply insert an html imbed. In the embed you need these values:
<input type="hidden" name="recipients" value="youremail&george@yourdomain.com">
<input type="hidden" name="good_url" value="http://www.yourdomain.com/success.html">
<input type="hidden" name="bad_url" value="http://www.yourdomain.com/failure.html">
<input type="hidden" name="subject" value="Inquiry from yourdomain.com Website">
Of course, you need to build the success.html page and the failure.html page and/or change that to whatever you want to call them but you do need a success and a failure page. Same with the recipient value in this example we are using the “$at_mangle” being “&george@” we described in this post to obfuscate the email address and the php form will replace that value with “@” when it processes the form. We use the @ sign in our mangle simply to fool scrapers into thinking it is a real email address so hopefully they’ll just move on but you could use anything.
Lastly you have to tell the form where to find the processor file. Under the form setting choose the method of “post” and the action is http://www.yourdomain.com/formmail.php
'Voila, you have your own form processing now and don’t have to rely on any third party services.
Hope it helps…
