Documentation
FORM MAIL REPLICATOR:  V1.0

System Requirements

  • Perl 5
  • Sendmail
  • Crontab

Preliminaries

  • Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.
  • Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM. 
  • After you have unpacked the TAR archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

Configure the .cgi files

configure.cgi

This file pretty much runs the whole show.  If you screw this one up don't count on anything working properly.   In other words, make sure you take the time to do this step CORRECTLY.  Ask your administrator if you need to.  Below are the variables used in ALL of the other cgi scripts.  All of the other cgi programs USE configure.cgi to figure out where certain things are. 

  • $adminemail = "you\@yourdomain.com";
  • $mailprog = '/usr/sbin/sendmail';
  • $pixURI="/formmailreplicator/pix";
  • $installcgidir = "/cgi-bin/formmailreplicator";
  • $datadirectory = "/full/path/to/cgi-bin/formmailreplicator/data";
  • $login="/formmailreplicator/index.html";
  • $registerurl = "http://www.yourdomain.com/formmailreplicator/";
  • $formdirectory="/full/path/to/formmailreplicator/forms";
  • $formdirurl = "http://www.yourdomain.com/formmailreplicator/forms";
  • $adminemail is your email address
  • $mailprog is the FULL PATH to sendmail on your server
  • $pixURI is URI (NOT URL) to the pix directory
  • $installcgidir is the relative URL to the formmailreplicator installation directory
  • $datadirectory is the FULL PATH to the formmailreplicator data directory
  • $login is the relative URL to the formmailreplicator /login/index.html file
  • $registerurl is the relative URL to the formmailreplicator installation HTML directory
  • $formdirectory is the FULL PATH to the formmailreplicator forms directory
  • $formdirurl is the URL to the formmailreplicator forms directory

Create Directories and upload files

  • Create a directory inside your HTML space called formmailreplicator
    • Inside of the formmailreplicator  folder create a directory called pix and upload all the .gifs
    • Inside of the formmailreplicator  folder create a directory called admin and upload the admin index.html file
    • Inside of the formmailreplicator  folder upload index.html (login page) and register.html (registration page)
    • Inside of the formmailreplicator  folder create a directory called forms and CHMOD this to 666 or 777 (this is where all the forms are created and stored)
  • Create a directory inside your cgi-bin space called formmailreplicator
    • Inside of the formmailreplicator cgi-bin folder create a directory called admin and upload all the admin cgi scripts, CHMOD them all to 755
    • Inside of the formmailreplicator cgi-bin folder upload all the rest of the cgi scripts, CHMOD them all to 755
    • Inside of the formmailreplicator cgi-bin folder create a directory called data and upload all .txt files and CHMOD them all to 666 or 777 (NOTE - delete the blank line at the beginning of each of these files listed below)
      • bulkmail.txt
      • clientemails.txt
      • email.txt
      • forms.txt
      • outgoingemails.txt
      • usernames.txt
    • Change the header.txt and footer.txt to display the custom header and footer you want inserted on each form created.
    • Change the file email.txt to include some type of signature you would like inserted after each outgoing email.  Keep it simple so you don't annoy your clients too much.

Password Protect These Directories

  • /cgi-bin/formmailreplicator/admin/
  • /formmailreplicator/admin/
  • See the TUTORIAL if you dont know how to to this already

Bulk Emailing Features

  • To use the bulk emailing function you will need to setup a crontab file to run /cgi-bin/admin/bulkemail.cgi nightly.  You will also need to set the path to configure.cgi inside of bulkemail.cgi to the FULL PATH (open the script to see what I mean - its near the top and looks like this)  require "/full/path/to/cgi-bin/formmailreplicator/configure.cgi";
  • You can also just extract the emails and use another program to mail your clients and users.  The files are as follows
    • /cgi-bin/formmailreplicator/admin/clientemails.txt  This file is the email addresses of your CLIENTS
    • /cgi-bin/formmailreplicator/admin/outgoingemails.txt  This file is the email addresses of people that used the forms

       

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