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Creating a Guestbook

1. Open FP98 (explorer mode).

2. Create a new page (don't use the Guestbook -- just a normal page).   This should ensure that the page is formatted with your theme or whatever settings you want.

3. Go to View -- make sure the Forms Toolbar is checked.

4. Design your form accordingly. I usually click on the "button" element on the Forms toolbar to start the forms section.

5. After you have designed your form, you will need to double-click on each form field element and assign it a "name". Do not assing a "name" value for the submit button -- you will probably need to double click on the submit button to clear the name value.

6. Right click anywhere in the form region -- a popup menu should appear -- click on Form
   Properties.

7. Within form properties -- assign the form action to save to a HTML web page. Give the name of the page "guestbook.html" -- this file will automatically be created when you save the form. You can also select which fields to write to the HTML file with this dialog -- and some standard HTTP header fields too. (user agent, timestamp, etc). You can also have the results saved to an additional file (formatted text file) if you want to import this information into a spreadsheet or database in the future.

8. Give the form a page name (title) and save it. Remember what you saved it as -- I used
   "guestadd.html".

9. Close that page and open the "guestbook.html" page (or whatever HTML file you named for the form to save the results to).

10. Edit that page accordingly -- you may need to apply shared boarders or page theme if the rest of your site uses these features. The page will appear blank except for a one-line comment -- you can do anything to that page, but leave that comment on the page -- that is where the new entries will be inserted (you can view the source and see it is just a FP98 web bot).

11. Upload and test.

Tips:

• Don't forget to format both the guestbook form and the results page like the rest of your site.

• Link to the guestbook form from your results page.

• Use tables to align your form fields on the  guestbook form.

• Save all these files in a world-readable directory (I used the root directory) -- don't save these files in the _private or any directory that starts with "_" -- these are hidden or private directories created by FrontPage.

• Test, test, test and, oh yeah, test your pages.

• Don't forget to link your guestbook pages to the rest of your site (and vice versa).

Common problems:

Why does the guestbook results contain the "submit" field?

By default, FP98 saves any field with a name associated with it -- even the  submit button. To change this either remove the name value for the submit button or remove the Submit listing form the "Saved Fields" tab on the Form Properties dialog.

Why does my results page display text with quotes?

By default, forms saved to file are saved as comma-delimited text files. Change this by opening the Form Properties and clicking on the options button -- then changing File Format to HTML.

Why can't my visitors view my guestbook results page?

By default, form result files are saved in the _private directory unless you specify otherwise. Change this by opening the Form Properties and clicking on the options button and changing the location of the file to any location except _private.