Web2Form

This manual will step you through the entire procedure of installing and testing Perl and two Perl modules on the machine hosting Internet Services. You will also learn how to configure your FirstClass server to accept mail delivered through the perl sendmail module.
The second part of this manual will show you how to use the FirstClass Web2Form application to convert your forms designed in FirstClass Designer into an html page and the corresponding perl script so that you will can provide visitors to your web site with a form that will submit a formatted email to a conference on your FirstClass Server.

This part of the documentation will step you through the process of installing Perl and the two associated perl modules on the machine hosting FirstClass Internet Services. You will also be shown how to test for a successful installation

Perl is a required component for this method of allowing the submission of FirstClass forms by unauthenticated users. Perl comes installed under OS X, but if you are running a Windows Internet Services, you must download and install Perl before you can proceed. You must download and install Active Perl on the same computer that you are running Internet Services.

In this solution, you will be using a Perl module installed on your Internet Services computer to submit a web form via email to either a person on conference on your server. You need to trust your Internet Services machine so that it can use the Perl Script for mail forwarding.

You must also ensure that email from trusted domains is allowed.

In order for Internet Services to be able to respond to perl scripts you must modify the AddHandler document found in the Internet Services folder

The perl cgi that will be used by Internet Services must be stored in the cgi-bin directory within the FirstClass Server directory where Internet Services is installed.

You will be directed, throughout this process to install additional files. These files have been zipped into a single archive and are made available to you.

For perl to be able to use your FirstClass server as the mail host, you need to install and configure the Sendmail.pm perl module.

In our example, we will be submitting an email to FirstClass that contains a date field on our custom form. FirstClass stores dates as the number of seconds from Jan 1, 1904. The date submitted on our form needs to be converted to seconds. You can install a perl module that will do the first part of this and we will use this in our perl script so that your FIrstClass message will receive the correct date.

To test your install of Perl and of the Sendmail module, you can modify and test the test.pl perl script that is provided in the support files folder.

The first step is to create your FirstClass form.
It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to describe how to build a FirstClass form using FirstClass Designer. This lesson will point out required fields and what field types you can use.

FirstClass Web2Form is an application that will create a web form and corresponding perl script that can be installed on your server. The form and script will allow unauthenticated users to submit posts to your FirstClass conferences and have those posts submitted as a custom FirstClass form.

Once you have entered all of the mandatory fields, you can preview your form. As you add each new optional field, preview your form to see what it looks like. Continue to modify the fields and preview until you have the desired result.

You can save a Web2Form template for future editing and/or share it with others using the Web2Form Application.

When you preview your form template, the corresponding perl file as named in the Perl Script field is saved to the same location as the template file.

When you previewed your form template, the corresponding html file named in the HTML Page Name field saved to the same location as the template file.

Before deploying to the masses, you need to test your solution.

There is no need to modify or open the Perl script. FirstClass Web2Form will create and verify the script based on the contents of your template. Below is a the perl script created by the sample template.