Website Design Peterborough, Jigowatt - Magento Web Design, UK » ThemeForest

AJAX Contact Form; Add or Remove Custom Fields

Chris — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:21:56 +0000

In a burst of Wordpress fever we decided to write another blog post to help all of our ThemeForest / CodeCanyon customers.

Alongside our ThemeForest and CodeCanyon success comes Customer Support. We get a lot of questions from users needing a point in the right direction so we thought we’d make it easier for us both and explain how to add custom fields to our ever popular AJAX Contact Form.

Add a Custom Field Tutorial

In this example we’re going to add a new simple text field (Your Height) which we want all users to fill in (a required, validated field).

Step One

Firstly, backup backup and backup again, once you’ve done that we need to edit our HTML to include our new field, we’re going to add this one under the ‘Your Name’ field.

In the included index.html file find the following lines..

1	<input name="name" type="text" id="name" size="30" value="" />

Below it we’re going to insert our new text field..

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<br />
<label for=height accesskey=H><span class="required">*</span> Your Height (cm)</label>
<input name="height" type="text" id="height" size="30" value="" />

Now save and close index.html, that’s the first step out of the way.

Step Two

This is an often overlooked though most important step of this tutorial.

We’re going to edit the Javascript handler (the AJAX part) of the contact form.

In the js/jquery.jigowatt.js file find the following line..

1	name: $('#name').val(),

For this example add the following code immediately below.. (please note the comma , after the line – this is important)

1	height: $('#height').val(),

Once done the section of the code should look like this..

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name: $('#name').val(),
height: $('#height').val(),
email: $('#email').val(),

Save and close jquery.jigowatt.js, that’s the second step done!

Step Three

The third and final step! We’re going to add our new field to the PHP form handler. This will validate it’s contents and put it into the e-mail.

In contact.php find the following line (aprox line 5)

1	$name = $_POST['name'];

Add the following code immediately below..

1	$height = $_POST['height'];

In contact.php find the following lines (aprox line 13)

1 2	echo ' Attention! You must enter your name. '; exit();

Add the following code immediately below..

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} else if(trim($height) == '') {
echo '

Attention! Please enter a your height.

';
exit();
} else if(!is_numeric($height)) {
echo '

Attention! Your height can only contain digits.

';
exit();

This piece of code checks that the user has firstly entered a value, and the further checks that they have only entered a numeric value. The only variables within this are $height and the error message you want to display if it finds a discrepancy.

And finally, place our validated variable into the e-mail.

Find the following (aprox line 70)

1	You have been contacted by $name with regards to $subject

Replace this with the following (notice the sentence change to include our new $height variable)

1	You have been contacted by $name who is $height cm tall with regards to $subject

And that’s it, you’ve just added a new field to your AJAX Contact Form! Upload the changed files and give it a test. Any questions, feedback or suggestions please use our comments box below.

5% later, a ThemeForest product update

Jay — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:25:13 +0000

It’s been a while since our previous ThemeForest update and the truth is that we’ve been so busy with other projects that we haven’t actually had time to add anything new to ThemeForest over the last couple of months (except for dozens of support comments of course).

However this has given us the perfect opportunity to test the business model and see how earnings pan out without being as active as we would like to be in the community. Here is a lowdown of our earnings and how they correlate with our activity:

We uploaded and began selling our first products on the 20th of June and in the next 10 days amassed 91 sales and earned $191 at the standard commission rate of 40%.

Throughout July we added several additional products and it turned out to be our most active month. This resulted in our most profitable period too earning $1500, again at 40%. This catapulted us to 2nd place in the “ThemeForest Popular Author” leaderboard with a total of 580 sales.

As I mentioned previously, from this point onwards our activity, besides support, has been minimal and our earnings have reflected this. We have experienced a dip in profit but it is not a steady decline, in fact our earnings seem to have leveled out at around $1000 per month whilst overall sales figures are steady. Aided by the fact that our commission rate is now 45% as our products have earned a total of >$11,800 we’re more than happy with how our ThemeForest adventure is progressing. Especially if we look back to those first 10 days in June and compare them to the first 10 days of November so far and compare them:

Month	Sales	Profit
June (10 days)	91	$191
November (10 days)	136	$358

This is encouraging reading and illustrates how fantastic the ThemeForest model is. Since our first product upload we’ve seen a rapid increase in interest in our own site and sales on ThemeForest, this has contributed to us being regularly featured as a monthly popular author and even generated new clients for projects outside of ThemeForest. After 2 or 3 months of not uploading anything new we’re still making good money which seems to be increasing. It will be interested to see how things develop when we find time to create and upload some new products.

Some other interesting information: Our most popular files have been, by far, our PHP scripts which continue to sell daily whilst the HTML templates seem to fall off the radar and not sell as often once they leave the ThemeForest homepage. This is perhaps due to the template market being totally saturated whilst the PHP section of ThemeForest is still in its infancy.

Our most popular product has been our AJAX Contact Form which has sold 720 times earning $1303.
Our most profitable product has been our PHP Login and User Management script which has earned us $1374
Our least popular/profitable product has been our PHP Users Online script which has sold just 32 times and earned us $42.
At a 40% commission rate we earned $4.80 for every $12 product sold, we now earn $5.40. An increase of 8%.

And finally, I leave you with our favorite testimonial to date:

Thanks, your scripts are quite addictive

Here’s to the next few months on ThemeForest!

PS We’re always looking out for good ideas for new scripts so feel free to leave a comment with any ideas, or even message us directly via Twitter.

Change the first day on our PHP Event Calendar Script

Jay — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:40:53 +0000

Just a quick post for any of our ThemeForest customers who’ve purchased our PHP Event Calendar Script and would like to change the first day of the week to Sunday.

If you want Sunday to be the first day enter this code

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$firstday = date("w",mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1, $year));
if ($firstday != 0){
for($y=$firstday; $y> 0; $y--) {
echo "

";
}
}

before this line

1	for($i=1; $i<= $day_count; $i++) { // Start of for $i

in the function list_events in the functions.php file.

Thanks to swamp_under on ThemeForest for posting this fix!

A ThemeForest Update

Jay — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:43:27 +0000

Our ThemeForest portfolio is continuing to grow, since releasing Cleen Theeme as detailed in the previous blog post we have gone on to produce several more files including two new templates, “photon” and “photon_dark” and a new PHP script; “PHP Login & User Management” which have all gone on to sell quite well.

We also have two more products ready for sale firstly a PHP/MySQL ‘users online’ script which uses a database to display the total number of visitors on a web site at any one time. Secondly we have a new template called Gossamer which is a simple little portfolio theme, built on an AJAX modular tab system so that all content is held within a single page. As with all of our HTML templates, Gossamer will also feature our PHP contact form script. You can see a sneak preview of Gossamer at ScreenJelly.

We’re proud to say that our Simple PHP Contact Form is currently the fastest selling and most popular PHP script on ThemeForest with over 160 sales in a little under a month generating over $450 gross income. Pretty impressive for such a simple little script.

So what have we learned in our first month of ThemeForestry? Well, as the Contact Form suggests, simple items sell best. Whilst all of our PHP scripts have done well the contact form has done the best generating $50 more than our next best script – the PHP Event Calendar. Kind of ironic seeing as it took the least amount of time to create. But this just reinforces how this marketplace is so successful;- If you can create something simple and usable, even if it takes you a long time and is sold for only $3 a go, you will make your money back and then some.

It seems that the same can be said for HTML templates. Currently our two best-selling templates are Cleen Theeme and photon, both of which are clean and simple in style and use a light colour palette opposed to a dark one. The other two however aren’t far behind, so it’s difficult to say for sure. I feel that a well designed dark template could do as well as it’s lighter counterparts if really pushed.

So what’s next? Looking at the popularity of WordPress themes this is the direction we will be looking to go in next. Whether we port one of our current templates into WordPress or create something entirely new is yet to be seen, but if there are any requests to see a particular template ported then it would make our decision a little easier!

Cleen Theeme released

Jay — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:45:50 +0000

Our latest product has been uploaded and is now available to purchase at ThemeForest. Say hello to Cleen Theeme!

Cleen Theeme is a simple PHP /HTML template fit for any purpose. With its stylish jQuery slides and Lightbox effects it leaves a great impression on every visitor to your site.

We are also working on a new PHP script which we will hopefully be releasing this week along with our next template: photon.

A ThemeForest Update

Jigowatt Joins ThemeForest

Jay — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:50:58 +0000

ThemeForest, created by Envato is a marketplace where users can buy and sell a wide variety of web related products such as HTML Templates, PHP scripts, WordPress Themes and Flash files. Not only is it a good place to make money, but ThemeForest allows us to take a break from a strict project brief or corporate image / identity and be really creative, designing files / scripts that we not only think users will find useful but are also fun to build and develop.

Jigowatt currently hosts 3 files for sale and have had an astounding response with over 90 sales in our first week of trading on ThemeForest. Below you’ll find details of each product and links to purchase and download them:

Simple PHP Contact Form

This website component allows you to easily place a self-contained Contact Page on any PHP page of your website.

PHP Event Calendar

PHP Event Calendar is a MySQL Database driven script that displays events on your website quickly and easily through a traditional calendar UI. It can be integrated into any existing PHP page within minutes using a simple file include.

HTML Template – Core

CORE is a HTML template designed to be used as a portfolio web site.

We’re delighted with the response all of our products have attracted including some extremely positive comments:

I love this. Very straightforward, yet robust at the same time.
- cajebo

amazing work !
- Valuediz

I bought this website (love it!), and had a concern over what appeared to be a stray group of pixels in the PSD file so I contacted “jigowatt”… Within 24 hours, he had gotten back to me, and provided me with the fix to my problem. His responsiveness and willingness to please were first class and top-notch!
- marksharper

We’ve also had a lot of constructive criticism and have been really impressed with the communities dedication to providing high quality products by helping each other out with suggestions and ideas to improve products which are already of a very high quality. Thus we already have updates on the way for our two PHP scripts, two new HTML templates ready to be uploaded and a whole host of other ideas for new and useful PHP scripts.

So here’s to our adventure on the ThemeForest wagon! Until next time, I will leave you with a link to our profile page: Jigowatt ThemeForest Profile Page and invite you to leave any suggestions via the comment form below. We also suggest that you subscribe to our RSS feed so that anyone who purchases our files will have immediate bulletins of when we update our products so that you can download the new versions (for free) ASAP.