Self-hosting forms, the sane way
karelvo.com
karelvo.com
N8n seems to have a pretty fine gui for configuring little pipelines, sort of alike node-red. If the author wanted to embellish & enhance what they have there's a variety of other connectors & processors they could easily snap into place. It's easy to glance at a pipeline and see what the general shape is. This high level world feels much more normative & clear than scratching together "simple" php scripts.
Ditto for sending data into nocodb. An Airtable spreadsheet/database like system, with a good gui, with form submissions being fed into a spreadsheet: it's again nicely high level. It integrates with other documents or reports, if you want. It's easy to access from the web. It's a very slick very user friendly solution that still brings a ton of power. Another huge win for a high level system.
I too had an initial WTF reaction, are you serious reaction. But it wasn't that hard to find some empathy when I tried. I didn't have to work that hard to appreciate what the post is going for, to envision what the actual usage/configuration looked like, and to see there is a pretty neat high level set of guis here that are used to program a very flexible small little pipeline. And I can see how each piece is extremely malleable by end users. That freedom to rework & reshape this system freely is really neat.
There may be good tailor made solutions that we can agree to dub as "simpler" for form handling, but the composability & flexibility of this end-user driven solution is super neat & super compelling to me. These tools are extremely generic & could be used for all manners of tasks, and that is enormously compelling, to good general systems that we can use to tackle all manners of tasks. This is a cool pick of tools to bring together.
And the authors thoughts about why are well spelt out. Not to mention that this seems infinitely more flexible than what some other people are recommending.
Like theirs an entire thread of people somehow acting like dumping forms to a mailto: handler that the client then has to send via a hopefully configured mail client is somehow a realistic and reliable option
For this purpose though it’s a non-issue as I also have a contact email published on my site so people can email me. And I would create a separate mailbox just for the form.
I’m not sure why people are concerned about their email being scraped as it’s comical that any email address isn’t already on a million spam lists.
obsfucating addreses won't work much longer anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38150096
Where you have to find a setting in mac / windows as well as configure your browser (chrome) for it, by using an obscure icon in the address bar etc.. and then you can have some apps fighting for you to change the setting. And then it depends on which browser profile is currently active. It is pretty messy to say the least
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
I don't understand why people don't understand why making users do this weird shit (and yes, mailto: is weird although not as weird as SVN/CVS vs Dropbox) isn't going to work.
And even when email sends, it's hard to guarantee delivery. I'd sooner set up and host an API than trust email to work in a business setting.
Author mentions "a form with file upload capability".
Anyone have any data / observations on this?
I think if my mom was trying to submit a form, and it opened her email client with a body consisting of URL encoded data she’d probably just close the email client thinking that something went wrong. Then she’d try again and the same thing would happen again. Then she might call me, and I’d probably tell her to just forget about it and try to call them on the phone instead or give up and try another company instead.
The e-mail client decodes the URL encoded data. So you actually see plain text. The encoding is only done for the purpose of passing the data from the browser to the e-mail client.
The result when using enctype=application/x-www-form-urlencoded and method=post in the form html is that the body that is shown in my email client is URL encoded.
They have a different enc type that you could use to specifically make it plain text. That one is not recommended because then you're gonna have a bad time parsing out the fields that were submitted from the form.
cat=services
btext=adsfasdfsdafsdf afsdfas asd fa sdf as dfs
subscribe-newsletter-weekly-yes=yes
In this case the values from the form get added as headers in the email so they are not directly visible to the user
I thought that I could still add user-visible subject and body by adding ?subject=foo&body=bar to the mailto: url
For example I could then have the subject say "Web form submission", and have the body of the mail contain a description that tells the user to send the email and that the data they filled into the form will be sent along with the email.
Even that is not great UX imo, but could still be interesting.
However from my testing with Brave web browser and Apple Mail, the subject and body are not filled in for the user in this case.
name=Billy%20Cravens
state=TX
https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/html/how-to-create-mailto-fo...
mailto:example@gmail.com?subject=About+your+extended+warranty
there are some niceties that have been added or maybe they were always possible - you can add a subject and message body, possibly cc etc.
i used it just last year to make an easy contact form for contacting local municipalities from a single website for my wife's NP
Having to send an email with the fields prepopulated feels rather archaic by comparison, and leaves me using form scripts as a rule now.
I can set up infinite emails on my $30/year cpanel host so I just create a new mailbox for the form and forward it wherever I like.
What does that mean?
I'd just assume the site was trying to trigger some kind of spam e-mail or something.
The idea that I'd fill out a form on a site, then submitting it would open my mail program, and I'd then have to hit send there, and then close my mail tab/window (not to mention exposing my e-mail address to the site when maybe I wouldn't want to), is some of the worst UX I've ever heard of.
Ignoring the general shittyness of email itself being plaintext or bastardized html that's destroyed the moment someone replies -- Different reply and quoting styles, emails |||||||| of every previous email in the thread. A haphazard mix of fonts, font sizes depending on the client, obnoxious signatures on every message. No one understands threads where threads in chat are immediately groked.
Ignoring all that. Unsolicited communication mediums can go die in the hell from whence they came. All communication that allows someone to message me without asking, where new identities can be minted like candy so they're impossible to block permanently. Awful. My inbox is just for password resets and spam now. Same with SMS, it's the messaging of last resort.
Being able to close your DMs to just actual humans you want to talk to is goated. Email, SMS, and my mailbox are just junk drawers ever since the marketing people got ahold of them.
It's just funny that with Communick I have a whole Discourse site setup because I was anticipating people weary of giving out email addresses, but in the end the majority of my customers just prefer to solve issues by email.
One could dream of a world where XMPP is relevant and that most clients support its HTML submission capabilities, but this is also not the timeline we're in.
And for others who use the static hosts' free tiers for hobby projects, Cloudflare provides form submissions to your static pages, netliffy forms is quite generous too https://www.netlify.com/platform/core/forms/
I would rather have something like this for a client who wants complete control of their data.
Cloudflare form plugin sets up a worker/handler, which is cheap and easy. It does require coding though, unlike the formsubmit.co link.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/functions/plugins/st...
And about Netlify. If you are getting more than 100 submissions/month on your hobby project, I think it might be time to consider some better serious solutions ;)
Is having a backend controller that securely writes to a DB when a url is posted to that difficult in PHP, that this 'sane' way is preferred? Isn't it the most basic of CRUD setups?
I can understand doing this because n8n has a quick way to send emails (at least that's what I assume based on this article), but I really don't understand how this over engineered solution is supposed to be the sane way.
Many crud apps which separate the frontend and backend have form validation and sanitization on the frontend and backend (partly by virtue of converting raw input into escaped json strings), but IIRC isn’t as straightforward in php.
This “PHP security is terrible” is mostly because people remember stories from 20 year ago (when none of the cool stacks didnt even exist) and things like Worpdress the most targeted cms/framework in the world.
I have suspicion that if Vercel/next powered 60% of web than its security reputation wouldnt be great either.
PHP is flawed but so are all the other stacks. PHP is old but that doesnt mean its not being updated or up to date. If anything its boring.
I use Symfony and using the form component (https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/form.html) you can achieve much of what is needed.
If you use the framework as well (which is very modular nowadays) you also have security built-in (https://symfony.com/doc/current/forms.html).
But probably not as fast as a "quick and loose" approach if you don't know Symfony yet, but extendible and secure (if you do know Symfony, it might be faster than the vanilla php approach, because you can avoid much of the "generic" code, the validators, the error handling, avoid SQL and XSS injection).
It really isn't.
The only one I can think of is SQL injection, but that's trivial to fix with placeholders.
At the office we have less proficient users who want to make web forms, but self-hosting the data is important to us.
Pretty sure you can do this without 3 different services.
This is literally a blog recommending to use n8n as your processor… that’s basically it lol he’s just adding ways that can be extended too like noco and metrics
But as an article about a cool way to utilize n8n, this is fair, and perhaps even elegant.
Is this something "n8n" does? I've gone to learn more about it, and it describes itself as an "AI-native workflow automation" tool. What the f** is that meant to actually mean?
Attacks on any form on the open web have gotten absurdly bad in recent years — hope the author is using something like Cloudflare + captcha.
Soo ... the file upload is happening via JSON webhook? Seems like this was defined as the scope and then file upload was just never mentioned again.
Even if you do want to eventually build your own it’s ridiculously fast as a prototyping tool, can pre-fetch data and use conditional logic and accept URL parameters and all that out of the box.
Update: not sure if the WPforms free version supports file uploads as the OP needs.
Coding php/symfony form by hand (if you can do it) might be security through obscurity but realistically it will probably just work for a decade without issues or maintenance.