ColdFusion Contact Form in One Easy File - Part 3
By: Michael Evangelista on Thursday, November 20, 2008
Reader Level: 
Michael Evangelista is a freelance web developer, ColdFusion programmer, and owner of a successful web and print design company based in southern Utah. Michael's company, Evangelista Design, has grown from a locally-oriented small business web design company to an international team of designers and ColdFusion developers offering a wide range of online business solutions, including full-service web hosting, custom content management applications, corporate data systems, and more.
In Part 2 of this tutorial,
we added several effective spam-prevention methods to our simple contact form, including a simple hidden honeypot field, comparison of submitted values against an easy-to-manage list of banned words and phrases, and a quick check to prevent submission of any html content (containing < and >).
Wired into a single ColdFusion file, we left off with a nifty little spam-blocking, self-submitting, auto-responding, error-handling dynamic gizmo, ready to be battle-tested in the war against spam. You should be able to drop the sample file from Part 2 into any .cfm page, adjust the cfmail settings and other options in the code, and go... it's really that easy!
So... if it works, what's left?
As with any creative or code-related project, there are always aspects that can be cleaned up, simplified and polished. In Part 3, the final part of this series, we'll do some of each:
- Streamline our error handling and error message display
- Simplify installation and customization options with easy-to-configure scoped variables
- Add custom client-side validation using the jQuery JavaScript library
...all in one simple bundle of files that you can insert into any page!
The ColdFusion Contact Forms in One Easy File Series:
ColdFusion Contact Forms in One Easy File - Part 1
ColdFusion Contact Forms in One Easy File - Part 2
ColdFusion Contact Forms in One Easy File - Part 3
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