by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a 38 minute video of me demoing a lot of different engenu functions. I got myself slightly screwed up in the middle, because I expected automatic inheritance to work at the level I was working on. In fact, it only works on folder levels below your current level, whatever that is. So when you make changes affecting the sidebar at the top level, which is what I was doing, you have to go in and make them manually.

I’m doing a lot of stuff in this video, but the way to learn how to use engenu is to use it.

Let me emphasize this: In this video, I spend most of my time talking, but in the course of all that chatter I built maybe 40 web pages, total. If you can build 40 new web pages in 38 minutes while you’re busy talking, good on ya. If not, you should learn how to use this software.

I’m embedding this, also, at Understanding engenu.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the features I built into the Universal Contact Form last night is source tracking. This is Direct Marketing 101 — know where your efforts are producing the best returns.

So to invoke the form with source-tracking, you would just do this:

http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php?source=CLad2

In this case, we’re assuming that the source of the click into the form is a Craigslist posting.

Same thing, but as a unique form:

http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php
?action=Relocation&source=CLad2

(I had to break the line at the question mark to make it fit. Here and below, these should be seen as being all one line.)

In reality, though, you’re not going to want to go directly to the form. You’re going to want to hit a landing page that has the form as its call to action. And, in light of that, you’re going to “include” the form in PHP.

Alas, the variables passed from the URL in your Craigslist ad will be lost. You can’t live without the action variable, but you already know what to do about that: Hard code it.

And that’s essentially what you’ll do with the source variable, as well — except you’ll soft code both variables by passing them through.

So you invoke the form like this:

include ("http://www.domain.com/UniversalContactForm.php
?action=$action&source=$source");

The action variable is being received into the PHP variable $action on the way into the landing page, and source is being received into $source. When you do the “include,” you are transferring to another variable space, so you need to pack up the two variables and ship them along as you go.

But having done that, the form has access to them, so it behaves just as you want it to. You can daisy-chain like that as many times as you need to and the form will still receive the variables.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve talked before about the idea of a software universe — where the set of actions possible in a given software configuration is so large that you can come up with tools and techniques never anticipated by the developers.

We went through this last fall when we started playing with WordPress Multiuser — and I ended up with my “featured listings” database running out of two Scenius scenes.

I’ve been enthralled all week with the idea of web-based forms that can talk to — and drive — my Heap database. I want to revise every form we have to work the Heap way, and I have a zillion ideas for a zillion new forms.

In consequence, today I rewrote my Universal Contact Form for the fourth time.

What I wanted was something I could use in many circumstances, in pursuit of many objectives, without creating one-off, manually-edited versions of the form.

For one thing, I want to play with “Gooder Group”-style ideas in a big way, and that will require a bunch of unique forms. So I built a form that I could make unique by editing parameter files, rather than by editing and re-editing PHP code.

Here are the major changes:

1. Any headlines or text setting up the form are now outside of the form and are your responsibility. The form begins with the anti-spam disclaimer and ends with the “submit” button. Everything else is up to you.

2. The behavior of the Heap-specific initialization file now includes optional menu-selected landing pages. Kudos to Scott Cowan for this wonderful idea.

3. The form behaves differently based on the contents of the Heap-specific initialization file.

4. It is now possible to invoke custom configurations of the form via the calling URL.

5. I added optional source-tracking.

Taken altogether, this change to the Universal Contact Form permits you to create as many unique variations of the form as you might need.

But: That’s all just chatter. Let’s see it in action:

Register here to get your own copy of the newer, even more-universal Universal Contact Form

< ?PHP include("http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/UniversalContactForm.php?action=Register&source=BHB"); ?>

Play with it. Work with it. Let me know if you can break it.