problems with FormBuilder

[wwwillem]

Hope I can get some help. A while back I installed FormBuilder and created couple of forms that will send emails to the web-admin. It all worked fine, but recently it stopped working. AFAIK I didn't change anything to my setup (but who knows .

The symptoms are that when I fill-in the form and click submit, the form goes 'processing' for a minute or so and then comes back with a standard "The page cannot be displayed".

OK, this is all vague enough that nobody will be able to help me. But my question is not so much "what did I do wrong", but more "where should I start looking to diagnose this". I can't seem to find any logging file that tells me what goes wrong. And without knowing what goes wrong it's tough to fix the problem.

Finally, the weird thing is that originally it all worked fine....

Willem

[pixelita]

Usually when something times out like that it's either a web hosting (server) issue or it's trying to find something and can't -- maybe because some setting that it relied on has been changed (again pointing a finger at the web host).  Are you running the email notification through SMTP?  Did your web host change something on your server? (They do that all the time and generally don't tell anyone, just wait for the support tickets to start trickling in...)

[wwwillem]

Would have been nice to blame this on my ISP , however it seems to be a CMS / FormBuilder problem.

I created a super small PHP function for sending an email which works fine.

---8X===---------------------------------------

Send Email


Email:
Message:




---8X===---------------------------------------

and then mailsend.php looks like

---8X===---------------------------------------

---8X===---------------------------------------

So still looking for any pointers to how I can debug FormBuilder.

Willem

[wwwillem]

Anybody seeing anything suspicious in the following code generated by the FormBuilder module?





 
 





 
    Email
   
 
 
    Name
   
      Select One
      abc
      xyz
   
 
 
   
 

[Maki]

OK, this is all vague enough that nobody will be able to help me. But my question is not so much "what did I do wrong", but more "where should I start looking to diagnose this". I can't seem to find any logging file that tells me what goes wrong. And without knowing what goes wrong it's tough to fix the problem.

In config.php there is a debug flag, set it to true and see if you get any error message.
It may be worth checking the CMSMailer preferences, it I recall correctly form builder uses them. Maybe you changed something there or your ISP changed something else (for example you choose "smtp" and now they only allow "mail" or "sendmail").

[wwwillem]

Thanks Maki !!! At least some suggestions to get started some research. I'm pretty experience web developer, but relatively new to CMSMS, so I didn't know about that flag.

And If I find the culprit, I will summarize of course.

And oh well, if all else fails it won't be touch to write a UDT with some php code to send the emails. But I predict that I will find my FB problem just _after_ I've written that code.

-

[wwwillem]

|
| It may be worth checking the CMSMailer preferences, it I recall correctly form builder uses them.
|

And that was the pointer in the right direction. The FormBuilder docs better say this in the first paragraph: TAKE CARE THAT YOUR CMSMAILER IS PROPERLY CONFIGURED AND THAT YOU CAN SEND A TEST EMAIL . . . . and don't bother to start with FormBuilder if that's not yet the case.

Oh well, let's hope that this thread will help people not to spend on this as much time as I did. So what do you need to do: in your Admin panel, select from the menu 'Extensions -> CMSMailer'. Try to configure smtp first, so replace localhost with your servers FQDN, probably click the checkbox "does your smtp server require authentication" and then add your userid and password.

Now click the "send test email" button and see what happens. In my case it didn't work. Now I know that some ISPs configure their stuff in such a way that you first _have to_ do a POP3 transaction before you can get access to SMTP. Maybe that was the case here. Then I tried 'sendmail' which didn't help me any further. And finally I selected the option 'mail', which so far works like a charm.

After CMSMailer was properly configured, FromBuilder worked flawlessly again.

[limey6]

It may be worth checking the CMSMailer preferences, it I recall correctly form builder uses them.

Thank You - finally been able to get my Form working after days of running around fruitlessly.

This should definitely be in the documentation about Form Builder. If I hadn't found it here I would have dumped cmsms.

[Nullig]

From the Formbuilder Help:

Dependencies

    * CMSMailer => 1.73

Granted, it's near the bottom of the help screen, but I think it's clear. Also, when you first install Formbuilder, you can see that the CMSMailer module then includes Formbuilder as a dependent.

Nullig

[limey6]

Hi Nullig,

I found what you pointed out but being new to CMSMS I had no idea what dependencies were. I would suggest that in the Form Builder Help Notes the opening paragraph should refer the user to CMS Mailer as the first point of call and that this needs to be set up BEFORE you even try to use Form Builder. It would have helped me a lot in the early stages if this had been the case.

Having sorted out my problems with the email I must say that CMSMS is exactly what it says on the box!