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HTMLHelp Forums _ General Web Design _ Help Creating An Advanced Form with Alternate Outcomes

Posted by: Ourihemai Jun 20 2012, 01:03 PM

Greetings,
I am a music composer, and am trying to offer a new service to my customers. I sell marching band shows for high school marching bands, which have multiple movements (songs) to them. What I am trying to create is a Form that the customer fills out with their name and personal information on the first page, and then on pages 2-4 of the form, there will be circles for the customer to choose from. Next to those there will be the name of the movement, and audio next to it. I drew a diagram. This will be for pages 2-4.
http://i50.tinypic.com/ev9ml1.png
(Forgot the next button on it tongue.gif )

On the final Page, it would ask for the Title of the marching show (entered through a text box), and allow the customer to backtrack to any of the other pages. Then, when the customer hits submit, it will show him a confirmation page, and a number (each movement has a certain number that goes with it that I will organiize) with the title and addition information. When the customer reaches that confirmation page, it will email me the information.

So, is there a way I could pull this off. I do not have enough money to hire a company to help me out with this, and I also need to update it with more of my compositions. I have seen it done before, but I need help and advice to get it started.

Posted by: Brian Chandler Jun 21 2012, 01:31 AM

You need to write a server script (in PHP, Perl, ASP etc) with a database (MySQL etc) to hold the orders. This is programming, but not particularly difficult.

Almost certainly you do not want anything mailed to you. You write admin script(s) for checking in the database what someone has ordered.

What sort of compositions are they?

Posted by: Ourihemai Jun 21 2012, 02:12 AM

Thanks for replying. What would you recommend for me to read. I know basic HTML and some perl, but I think PHP might be easier. The compositions that I compose for are for Marching Band. They vary in Genre, because they are meant to entertain the audience at football games and marching band competitions.

Posted by: Brian Chandler Jun 21 2012, 07:33 AM

If you have absolutely no programming experience, diving in might be too steep, but if you have any at all I would recommend going straight to a book on "PHP+MySQL" (which is a very available combination on most web hosts). In a sense the actual programming is not very complex at all, because you are always doing the same things: "Extract the database records matching <condition> and process them one by one". On the other hand the bit that it's easy to get wrong is the basic design/layout. What pages does the viewer see? How do you select a program(me) of music? If there are 1000s (or even 100s) of pieces, a scheme with a drop-down box for each of "Selection 1", "selection 2" etc is not really going to work.

But first of all you probably want to work out how to keep your "catalog" in a database, instead of spread over different html pages. Then add "Selection" and such functions gradually.


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