Advanced: Create a Categorized Message Board

Freeservers offers some advanced tools that allow a great degree of website interactivity. The Form E-mailer can be used to gather information from your visitors, and Freeservers' custom <ISML> tag can be used to insert information into pages on the fly.

Click here to see a simple example that uses both to create a simple message board page. From there, you can download a ZIP file with the files necessary to create the board so you can customize it.

The files that are needed to make this work are:

• index.html--The main page, containing the <ISML> tag that pulls in catlist.txt, and the submission form used by the Form E-mailer utility.
• addc.htm--Form to get information to add a category.
• addclist.txt--The template the Form E-mailer utility uses to append a category to catlist.txt.
• addc.txt--The template the Form E-mailer utility uses to create a new page for the new category. To insure unique filenames, they are based on the visitor counter and time.
• addcsuc.htm--The success page for an added category. Automatically bounces back to index.html.
• addm.htm--Form to get information to add a message.
• addm.txt--The template the Form E-mailer utility uses to append a new message to the category page.
• addmsuc.htm--The success page for an added message. Automatically bounces back to the category page.
• catlist.txt--(added automatically when first category is created) A list of the categories.

For a detailed explanation on how to use the <ISML> tag to pull in text from another file, click here. For details on how to customize the Form E-mailer, click here.