Use Coranto with an SCForm Contact List

The Scripts

Coranto is a Content Management Script available at:

http://www.coranto.org/

It provides a web interface for creating and updating your website content.

SCForm is form mailer script that allows your list of contact e-mails to be hidden from e-mail harvesting robots. It is available at:

http://jimsun.linxnet.com/SCForm.html

Analysis

Since you can control the format that Coranto use to write its output files you can use Coranto to update this file. This means that you can update the e-mail addresses of the people on the contact list, add new contacts, or delete people from the list from just about anywhere you can access the internet.

I suggest getting SCForm functioning correctly before you build the interface with Coranto. Once you have it installed and running making it work with Coranto is simple.

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SCForm Data Structure

SCForm uses a delimited text file to store your contact information. The file has three fields

• Key
• Menu Text
• E-Mail Address

They are stored separated by a colon. For example:

This is a list of three contacts formatted for use by SCForm. The page with the contact form reads this file and displays the menu text as a drop down select list. The Key is used to tie the menu text to the e-mail address when the script that sends the e-mail is called upon submission of the form.

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Building the data file with Coranto

News Fields

To use Coranto to maintain this list add three news fields.

• FormKey
• FormText
• FormEmail

Make them all one line text fields.

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Style Code

Define a style (we'll call it contacts) with this structure:

Enter the style code on one line and be sure to press return at the end of the of the line. Then save the style.

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Profile Settings

Create a profile called Contacts and set the following options:

filename: contacts.cfg (this is the name SCForm Uses)

Set the path to the path where you put SCForm's contacts.cfg file when you installed it.

Make sure:

• Filter By Time
• Filter By Number
• Skip Days
• Skip Items

are all blank.

Select the news style we created earlier from the drop down list.

Enable Headlines - Should be set to NO

HTML Template - Should be set to none

Sort Order - can be set to your preference.

Anchor Tags - should be set to NO

Save the profile settings and then enable the profile.

If you are using XMS profiles to define profiles for submitting news make a new XMS profile for your contacts submission. Include the three custom fields you defined earlier and the standard subject field. Order them the way you want, save the profile, and enable it.

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How to use

When submitting a contact fill out the three custom fields you made and then put a description of the contact in the subject field. The text in the subject field will show up on the modify news page. If you leave it blank you will have a bunch of blank entries on the modify news page, unless you are using an addon.

When your news is built your test contacts.cfg file will be overwritten by the file Coranto creates. Go to your contact form page and you should see the list of contacts you entered in Coranto.

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Using a Ban List

SCForm also has a banlist. This can also be managed with Coranto. The banlist format is simply one entry per line.

Create a custom field such as:

BanList

write a style:

Making sure that you add a return at the end of the line and save it.

Following the steps above, create a profile that uses this style to create the banlist.cfg file used by SCForm in the same place you installed the file that came with SCForm.

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Notes

• If you are going to use a banlist, read the SCForm documentation for this and make sure you understand it. You could accidentally ban people you don't intend to using the patterns available.

Alternatives

You should also look at the ShadowMail addon by Parahead.

Publishing Information

• Originally published - November 13, 2003
• July 28, 2006
  • Reformatted and published on this wiki

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Discussion/Comments

Discussion and comments for this article are in this forum thread.

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