Hey, I'm planning oh having some e-cards on a site, the idea is someone picks one of four designs maybe with a radio or checkbox and fills in their name and email address and the recipient's email address and name which along with the picture and a message get sent to them.

I have a vague idea about some of the aspects, but can anybody point me in the righ direction of what i might need to do, or better yet a kind of tutorial?

Anybody helping me will earn some serious karma points

Use echo in php and image generation.

Use $_POST to retrieve the user's form input. (Or $_GET if your <form> method is get. Post would be more appropriate, though.)

Then use if or switch to add the correct image into your email output variable.

Then put the HTML-encoded message into a mail() function.

Then use echo() to tell the sender that it's been sent or header() to redirect them to a pre-made success page (or failure--if(!mail(...)) { //failure } else { //success })


This is fairly simple if you know PHP and HTML well. (But, hey, we all learned sometime, hope this helps ya.)

Thanks it's all very helpful, it's given me something to research (I'm just staring out with PHP) Do I need to store the card examples in a database?

you store the cards in a folder on the server,
in the data base you make a table that hods something like :
---ecardID
---ecardCatID ( the ID number of the cards Category )
---ecardName
---ecardFileName
---cardDescription

also you need to make a table for sent ecards like :
---secardID
---ecardID
---secardMessage
---secardDate

and maybe add the sender and recepient.