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Auto email reply - novice completely lost!

davidmcc3 27 Nov, 2008
Hi
It's a long story but ... I've inherited a Joomla website with Chrono ... the original author is from Eastern Europe and effectively out of the loop. I've never used Joomla before, and my website-building experience is as an amateur with Dreamweaver (background in IT management, no recent technical skills).

The version of Chrono installed is ... 2.5 J1.5 RC3.1 ... Joomla is 1.5.5 legacy.

A form exists and works, sending details of entered info to an email address. I've checked out the tutorials and all the threads here ... copied & amended some code (found in one of the threads) to go into the 'on submit after email' box. It doesn't work, and even with debug ON, I can find no error messages.

Tutorial 3 (Adding emails) talks about the "email block" in Forms Manager, and the "Setup Emails" tab in the form editor - I have neither of these. See partial screen shots attached.

So, I'm completely floundering and have no idea how to achieve a simple email confirming a site visitor's details have been received.

My client also wants to send a PDF attachement back with the email ... but, hey ... lets get the email response working first!

All offers to fix this problem, buy me drink, send me on a restful holiday in the sun, all gratefully accepted.

David

[attachment=1]Chrono forms manager screen.jpg[/attachment]
[attachment=0]Chrono forms manager screen-2.jpg[/attachment]
GreyHead 27 Nov, 2008
Hi David,

You have an old version of ChronoForms - that's why the tutorials don't match up. The current release is CF v3.0 Stable.

There is no automatic upgrade for your form but it's a relatively simple cut and paste job as you aren't saving the data in a database table.

If you take a Form Backup of your form using the Backup Form icon in the Forms Manager and post it here (you'll need to zip it) or email it to me at the address in my sig I'll take a look and see if we can do this for you (depends on how complex/messy the form is).

That's not the whole answer to your questions but is a good first step.

Bob

PS You've also inherited an out of date version of Joomla and you should update to J1.5.8 as there are some security risks in the earlier versions - and some hackers who seek them out.
davidmcc3 27 Nov, 2008
Hello Bob.

Thank you for your kind offer - zip file attached.

I suspected there would be version trouble ahead - and I don't have control of the hosting ... just what I can get at from within Joomla admin - I guess that's something I'll have to report back to my clients (I believe their development team have the access, but no more knowledge of Joomla and PHP than me). I'm also concerned that, from what I've read in the Joomla forum, running a test system alongside the live (either on the hosting or locally) isn't straightforward ... and I hate doing major work on a live system I can't backup! ... (and I don't even know if it is backed up!)

However, first things first ... getting the contact form working properly will be a good start.

Many thanks.

David
GreyHead 27 Nov, 2008
Hi David,

Got the zip file - I'll take a look in a few minutes.

You can update ChronoForms from the Admin once you have the revised form, just uninstall the old version and then install the new one from the Extensions menu.

You can't upgrade Joomal that way and it wil be worth your while hunting down FTP access to the site, usually that's prety straightforward from the web hosting control panel.

Assuming that you have superadmin rights you shoudl probably also instal the exTplorer and the EasySQL extensions - both are good free tools that will let you look at the files and the database tables from inside the Joomla Admin.

Bob
GreyHead 27 Nov, 2008
Hi David,

Updated from attached, this should restore OK in ChronoForms v3.0.

I've copied over the contents from the existing form - all seems to work OK. I made two changes[list]
  • I made the mail field 'required' in the validation tab
  • I moved the second email from the OnSubmit code into a second email in Email tab and put the text into the corresponding Email template
  • DeBug is on (in the General Tab) so you'll get some DeBug reports when you first submit.
  • [/list]
    Bob

    PS It may be worth setting up a local test site using XAMPP to try stuff out.
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