Overview of PonyExpress Forms

Forms are HTML components of Web pages that accept information from visitors, allowing for two-way communication with the visitors to your site. A form might send this information to an e-mail address, write it to a Web page, or otherwise store it in a file on the server. Examples include:

Usage	Description	Examples
Form to Email	You can send information collected from a Web page to an e-mail address (or addresses). The e-mail message can be pre-formatted as you specify, or encrypted (www.bu.edu only) for secure online transactions using a PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) key.	- Ask a Web Question
Form to Web Page	You can collect info from visitors and add it to another Web page, again formatted any way you like.	- Add a Feature - Output (Note: These pages use FormLogin so you may need to use your BU Login and Kerberos password to login).
Form to Datafile	You can write data collected from a Web page to a tab-delimited file which you can then import into the database software of your choice (e.g. Excel, FileMaker).	- Add a PGP key - Output (Note: This page also requires WebLogin, so you may need to use your BU Login and Kerberos password to login).

Learning to create and use forms is fairly painless. All you will need is an HTML or plain text editor (Anything from Windows' Notepad to Dreamweaver will work fine), and an account on either www.bu.edu or people.bu.edu.

On the following pages, we will explore all of the HTML tags used to create forms, the special tags and template files you will use in conjunction with BU's PonyExpress program, and finally answers to common questions and problems faced by new users of Web forms. Step one is to learn the Elements of HTML forms.