I’ve completely rebuilt a site un UIKit and although there a few tiny tweaks still to do its pretty much complete and working OK. The old site was built in Sparkle and although not as nice as the new one it did all work.
I’ve had a great time learning UIKit in the process, although I did fall back onto 3rd party stacks in a few places where I just couldn’t work out how to do things in UIKit. However I have a couple of niggles I need to sort before showing the client:
If you go to the Aqua Canines page (https://reesandcompany.co.uk/lechlade/hydrotherapy/) you’ll see a bunch of buttons in the first section. The ‘Referral Form’ button is linked to a pdf that’s in the resources folder. However clicking the button doesn’t open the pdf in a new window as it should. I could only get it to work by right-clicking and manually opening it… Any ideas why a single click doesn’t work?
On the homepage there’s a simple email form that just pings off an email to the client who happens to have a gmail address. There is no mail associated with the lechladek9 domain so I can’t put an email in the form settings that has the same domain as the server, it has to be from his gmail account. This worked fine in Sparkle, you just put a to and from email in and it all just worked. Is there any way I can get this to work in UIKit? Or even using another stack? It’s not currently working for me when I test it by putting my address in…
Hey Roger the Referral Form button is set to scroll, you might first remove that integration. As for the email set an email in their server and redirect to the gmail account, so simple.
Also the Contact Us link at the Navbar works just on the home page, not from another pages. That’s probably because you’ve set the link to scroll to the contact form, at the bottom of the home page. You need to rethink this one: one idea would be to make a dedicated page for the contact form or add a contact form in a Modal that will be available at every page.
Thanks for the help, The links for contact us aren’t finished yet. Once the site is on the clients server then I will change them to full url’s with a # to the correct place on the homepage.
I did wonder about setting up an email forwarder but I’m not sure if the client even has mail for this domain. I’ll have to check. Good to know it will work though.
Thanks for the heads up on the button! User error again… D’oh!
Hi @Lucas. This is still not working. I have made a new email on the host server (acagility.co.uk) and have forwarded it to my own email for testing purposes. I have tried sending a normal email to the new address and it works, I get the forwarded response almost immediately. I have uploaded the site to a subfolder of acagility.co.uk and I’ve added the email address in the ‘form’ stack. See attached image. when I fill in my form and hit submit, it says message has been sent but nothing ever turns up. ??
Where am I going wrong?
Thanks
The mail address on the server is purely a forwarder, it doesn’t store anything, just forwards anything sent to it to my own personal email, which is nothing to do with the domain.
When I send an email from apple mail to the acagility.co.uk address it gets forwarded straight back to me, so I know the forward is working as it should.
However when I try and fill in the form on my page and submit it, I get nothing. I cannot tell if the form is sending to the forwarder but I assume not as it would come to me. If I look at the php file generated by the stack I can see that the correct address is present (see pic)
I’m sure I’m making a simple mistake but I can’t figure it out. I’ve watched your video on forms over and over and I’m sure I’m following it correctly but who knows…
I may be misunderstanding what you are looking to do, but perhaps the simplest solution to just add a mailto: link to the button? Then, when clicked, the default email client will open and the user can send an email that way.
This way, your server isn’t involved, so no messing with php mail and different email addresses to the domain. Downside of this though is that the email address will be open to being scraped.
Yeah. I don’t want to do that. Not as professional looking and the client doesn’t want messages with extra content. Just an email address to add to his mailing list. I’ve never had these issues before. In Muse and Sparkle it just works. No need to have same server or messing with php. Just add a form. Bung in an email to send the results to and Bob’s your uncle.
Yeah. That was what I was trying first before I asked on here. I’ll have to see if I can find out how sparkle does it and see if I can cut and paste some code. I’m happy to buy another stack but I’m worried that won’t work either.
I think I’ve come into this a bit late and am not understanding what you are trying to do.
You have a form on the page, and you want the user to complete it, click send, and for the email to go to a Gmail account? (I did try the links to see what you are doing, but the links don’t work for me.)
If your client is in the UK, he just can’t do that, it’s against GDPR and he potentially could get in a lot of bother. If he/you is using a form on the site for people to subscribe to his mailing list, he/you absolutely must put in place a double opt-in process, this can’t be done with a simple form.
I moved the site so it was on the domain it’s sending the mail from. It’s now at acagility.co.uk/dev
I wanted to get the form working first before adding the gdpr stuff. I thought there was a stack somewhere to handle that but I’m probably wrong. I’ll tell him he might have to do without that method until I can work it out.
I would have thought that by asking to be put on a mailing list you are giving your approval to be on it by default.
Let’s say I add your email address to a website signup box and say I want to be on the mailing list. How will the persona managing the list know that it was me not you who added your email? The result is you get added to a list you might not want to be added to. Double opt-in stops this.
@joeworkman has an excellent solution for this, I use it on the UIkitter site: www.UIkitter.com (feel free to signup to try it out, you can easily unsubscribe by following the instructions on the site). I integrated it with Sendy, which powers my the backend of my email marketing service, www.Mailshotmonkey.co.uk.
It can connect to most popular bulk email services (Mailchimp, Sendy etc.) and will integrate with their double opt-in signup process. Alternatively you can use the signup boxes supplied by most of these services, it’s normally just a bit of code, but personally, I prefer Joe’s solution, Post Office, as it’s much cleaner. Post Office Stack for RapidWeaver
Your client is never going to able to just collect emails for a mailing list from a simple email form, not without breaking the regs.
Ok good point. I never even thought of that. Perhaps I’m too honest. Ha ha.
Thanks for the suggestion of joes stack. I just bought his seo one today so will take a look at the post one tomorrow. My client doesn’t do bulk emails using any of those services. He’s a small local dog trainer and probably has no more than 39 or 40 people if that.
Thanks for the help though Steve. Much appreciated. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to return the favour but if you ever get stuck using After Effects or Cinema 4D. Then I’m your man!
I hear what you’re saying, but if he is sending out newsletters, and more over, if you are helping the process, for your own protection, he has to use a bulk service, with double opt-in and simple unsubscribe. He should really, as well as the sign-up boxes on the site have unsubscribe ones too. The regs say users must be able to unsubscribe as easily as they subscribe and in the same places. Although almost no-one bothers with unsub boxes on their sites!
He you support him in just getting email addresses and sending newsletters out via Gmail, it’ll all be fine, until it’s not, and then you will be the person he goes after.
If you’re gonna get involved with mailing lists, so it right, or just say no.
I’d need to see your settings to help more, but I suspect the issue isn’t the form but your server. Some servers are just a total bitch to get working with php mail, specially cheap ones. I’d start investigating your PHP settings on the server.
For what it’s worth, I’ve got UIkit forms on a lot of live sites now, none have had any issues sending emails, but then I have a dedicated VPS server thingie, with a guy to manage it for me, so if there was a problem with the PHP settings he’d have fixed them.
Don’t worry for now. It’s a full business hosting package on UK2 so it should be fine. php is v7 but haven’t checked the settings in cpanel as yet.
For now we’re going to scrap the contact form…
