I’m working on 2 custom CMSs, and doing some research and development for a 3rd one. The first two are online shops with more custom pages for details, information, products and other static data. I’m using an older online shop script I’ve written 4 years ago, and I’m discovering some major bugs and other things that need fixing. One the online shop script is ready, I intend to make it open source and place it on the home page.

The third web site is for a friend’s band and is currently in a development loop, it’s based on Joomla and it looks really ugly. The designer may be bored. So, I thought I might use WordPress, as the client wishes a theme switcher script, and WordPress has plenty of them as plugins. And, moreover, for the client’s needs, Joomla is way too complex than WordPress. And I have no experience with Joomla.

As a personal project, I will turn Blog Tycoon into a themes repository (open source of course). I have many WordPress themes I’ve worked on, and I will move them from the blog and the main corporate page. It will be split into 3 parts: framework themes, regular themes and premium themes (also free). The domain was lying around without a decent idea for it, and I started to doubt if I should renew it. But the themes idea seems very appealing.

You can follow me on Twitter, though updates are rare.

This is an announcement.

I am looking for bloggers interested in writing articles on Blog Tycoon. Short insights, tutorials, articles, anything that fits the niche. In exchange, you receive an author review, and a backlink to your blog or web site. Comment here if you are interested in a free and easy self-promotion method.

These last two months have been pretty productive for me, as I’ve finalized some clients’ web sites, and launched some private projects. More are in the production, but we’ll talk about them another time.

I’ve designed some pretty themes for these web sites, and I hope the new design will bring more visitors/clients.

The last tutorial was about a PHP/MySQL counter for a client. The same client requested a simple contact form, with no AJAX, or other options. So, I used the PHP mail() function, wrapped in a simple XHTML form.

First, we create the XHTML form (contact.php):

<h1>Simple Contact Form</h1>
<form name="form1" method="post" action="send_contact.php">
<p><input name="subject" type="text" id="subject" size="50" /> <label for="subject">Subject</label></p>
<p><textarea name="detail" cols="50" rows="4" id="detail"></textarea> <label for="detail">Detail</label></p>
<p><input name="name" type="text" id="name" size="50" /> <label for="name">Name</label></p>
<p><input name="customer_mail" type="text" id="customer_mail" size="50" /> <label for="customer_mail">Email</label></p>
<p><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit" /> <input type="reset" name="Submit2" value="Reset" /></p>
</form>

Next, we create the mail sending engine (send_contact.php):

<?php
$subject ="$subject";
$message="$detail";
$mail_from="$customer_mail";
$header="from: $name <$mail_from>";

// Your email address
$to ='someone@somewhere.com';
$send_contact=mail($to,$subject,$message,$header);

// If message was successfully sent, display a message
if($send_contact) {
echo "Thank you for your interest. We will answer as soon as possible.";
}
else {
echo "Error: The email was not sent. Check your server.";
}
?>

That is all. You can include the contact.php file into your web site design.

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