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Ultimate Guestbook Tutorial: How to build a Guestbook with a honeypot, error checking, IP banning, pagination, e-mail notification and smilies with PHP and mySQL
April 26, 2008,
47,482 views
So in this section we will make a skin file that will allow us to style the layout of the guestbook, whilst also including a css file and the required HTML header/footer statements.
1. In the templates folder make a file called skin.php and add in this code:
<?php echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>'; ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" >
<head>
<title>Guestbook Tutorial</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="templates/css/style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<table width="300" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center">
<tr>
<td valign="top"><?php include('form.php');?></td>
</tr>
</table>
This code simply tells the browser how to read the page, adds a css stylesheet to the page and then using ‘‘ brings in the form.php page as if it were part of the skin.php page. Simple 
Save that file!
2. Now lets add a controller file, which is a file that the visitor will arrive at first, and will never see the form.php or the skin.php but instead will see the final product of all combined. If you don’t get what i mean, you will later on in the tutorial! Outside of the templates directory make a file called ‘index.php’ and add this code:
<?php
include('templates/skin.php');
?>
You should now understand what’s going on there. Indeed we included the skin.php file to the main page. You will see the benefit of doing this later on.
3. Next up lets quickly get the stylesheet going. Make a new folder in the templates folder and call it ‘css’. Then make a file inside of this folder and call it ‘style.css’. Congrats. Now lets throw some style into this file. Open it up and save this code into it:
/** GuestBook Tutorial CSS **/
html,body {
background: #222222;
color: #FFFFFF;
font-family: "HelveticaNeue-UltraLight", Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Courier;
}
.guestbookform {
padding: 10px;
border: #999999 solid 1px;
background: #333333;
}
input, textarea {
border: #999999 solid 1px;
width: 100%;
resize: none;
background: #FFFFFF;
color: #222222;
}
form, input {
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px;
}
Excellent. So now if you look at your page it should look something like:
Time to give this guestbook some function.
Posted by VoiDeT –
60 Comments
Hello VOIDET
I spent last night going through this tutorial and it was great and informative.
One question I have is that I see your guestbook example has had some spambot action. Is this because there are new techniques that your tutorial doesn’t cover? I’d like to keep this kind of crap off my guest book if possible.
Thanks for your great tutorial and your feedback.
Best,
CGar
Hey Cgar,
This is both true and unfortunate.
I only taught one spam catching technique.
However more can be applied if need be. Generating a captcha form, or having an ip-ban with 30 day cool off period. Running known ip blocking from black lists.
The honey pot technique is just one! Surprisingly, it rejects quite alot!
Let me know if i can help you out further!
VoiDeT
Hi there,
A great tut! Im trying to put it on my site.
But there is one little problem. The honeypot.. when is add this link:
a new text field appears on my guestbook, while you where saying that it was hidden?
How is that possible?
Dennis
Hi there. Thanks for the great tut. Sorry…forgot to read the last side, as I didn’t used all of the tut for my guestbook at the moment. So I implemented the guestbook in my website without asking you first. And…I’m not completly ready, still working on some things as the honeypot and the pagination.
Hello VOIDET,
This is the best tutorial on the internet so far!
I’m stuck at stage 7 – 10,
it looked fine until stage 7 then the succes-message never showed up.
The IP thing didin’t work for me :/ so I jumped that part and now I’m trying to get the entries to work out, but it show me this message:
Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in C:\xampp\htdocs\guestbook\templates\entries.php on line 6
do you have a idea of what’s wrong?
I would be happy for any help, just contact my email!
Regards Zime
@Zime:
Thanks a lot for the kind words.
That’s a shame that you can’t get the guestbook working. It looks as though your data isn’t being insert correctly. What you can do however is check your database for any records. If they aren’t in there then check what’s going on with data you’re inserting, and the insert commands.
If you do see the data in there, then check what’s happening when you try and retrieve the records.
I’m thinking i might rewrite this tutorial to use OOP with PHP5.
Or maybe save that for a whole new tutorial.
Hi
First great thanks to the author of this tutorial/workshop
Its working great. But there is only a single problem with the website links in the db entrys they re not working.
The link includes the hole file path i.e.(http://htdocs/mywebsite/www.pcsh.it) whats wrong?
thx in advance and best regards
Oli
THX a lot
love this tut
hey, where can i find the turtorial?
greetings
Dude, many thanks for this nice and clean tutorial. Took me about an hour to read it all up and add own commands.