A couple of my readers from my recent SitePoint article have asked me about how they could extend the Ajax mailing list sign up system to receive further inputs like the user’s name and phone number. It’s actually pretty simple. If you have additional fields in your form, just modify the parameters string in mailingList.js. Here’s an example:
var pars = 'address='+escape($F('address')) + '&firstName='+escape($F('firstName')) + '&lastName='+escape($F('lastName')) + '&phone='+escape($F('phone'));
You can see that you can append as many or as few inputs from your form by just extending the GET string passed to the PHP script. Notice I’ve added the “&” before the next parameter names as is required in any GET string with more than one variable included. Of course you would need to adjust your MySQL table to include these fields, and change storeAddress.php to receive the values as well.
$address = $_GET['address'];
$firstName = $_GET[’firstName’];
$lastName = $_GET[’lastName’];
$phone = $_GET[’phone’];
$addresscheck = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM mailinglist WHERE email='" . $address . "', firstName='" . $firstName . " ', lastName='" . $lastName . "', phone=' . $phone . "' ");
It’s also quite easy to modify this technique to work for things like contact forms, or user input in a CMS by simply adjusting your form, and the references to the field names. The principles are still the same.
If you are interested in other useful Ajax tools, you may want to check out Dustin Diaz’s Ajax contact form. It’s pretty clever, and packed with nice effects, but seems to struggle to work in Opera. It’s a pretty sophisticated example of a contact form.
A word of caution, it’s pretty easy to get swept up by the allure and ease of implementation of many Ajax/DOM scripting tricks. Always ask yourself how it benefits or hurts the user experience. If you find yourself adding features because they are cool, yet they negatively impact findability, accessibility, or cross-browser use then you probably should reconsider. James Edwards has written a sobering article about Ajax and screen readers (lump search engine spiders in that group too as they are equally as blind) that may bring you back down to earth about the Ajax trend. I should also mention that my article is actually backwards compatible for those without JavaScript enabled, giving us the best of both worlds. The article also uses Ajax specifically to enhance the user-experience by making the impulse action of signing up for a mailing list faster and more convenient.
