Ever since I started building websites I’ve found making forms to be time consuming, tedious and generally boring, and I’m pretty sure most web developers are in a similar situation.

First of all you have your HTML form, which then submits all the data to PHP to be validated etc. You have to write the validation rules for each form field in PHP, and then come up with a system of reporting errors back to the user. With large forms this can get extremely complicated!

Around two years ago I can across a form validator by Simon Willison. This basically lets you write the entire form and it’s validation rules in the html. These rules are then read by PHP, applied to the relevant form fields and so on. It’s a very elegant solution that makes building forms much easier and faster, as well as easier to debug and maintain. I’ve been using this script for the last 2 years and have made various changes to the script along the way to suit my purposes.

However, the script does have it’s down-points. It uses the PHP 4 XML library which to be honest is rubbish! It causes the code to become extremely bloated and unable to handle certain characters such as ampersands (&). This means that as soon as a user enters an ampersand or a character like a dollar, the script would crash!

The script also only supported textfields, and didn’t provide support for radio buttons, checkboxes and select drop-down lists.

With all these positives and negatives in mind I’ve built my own PHP Form Processor from scratch, which I think does the job quite nicely. The script is open source and I’ve provided a tutorial on how to use it.

The script also protects your forms against CSRF (Cross-site request forgery) and form manipulation. Anyway, without futher ado, here is the tutorial.. Read more…