Hi all -

I'm a new WFB user. Making progress, but I have to fine tune the form - as well as finish and tune up the rest of the site I'm working on. So far, I have a proof of concept, in which I'm testing embedding a WFB form in a web page created in Xara Designer Pro X v9.

Here's what the form looks like when it's hosted in a sub-dir on a site I used (this is a totally uncustomized GoDaddy server):

http://stronggroup.com/test/calctest2/h … r_form.php

I have the EXACT same files, same folders, same folder structure, sitting in the web content path for my locally installed WAMP installation - and it behaves differently on the local machine than it does when hosted on my public site. Some details:

I've got the AMPP WAMP distribution installed (I've tried a few - this looks like one of the better ones, and better maintained as well). Apache is working, the alias for my web directory is working, PHP is working -- I've tested this all with a simple PHP info / version request test page that I drop in the same web directory (locally) -- this all works.

However - when I browse to the web page that holds the embedded WFB form, the form remains invisible. I'm at a loss to understand why this is happening. I've verified the AMPP / WAMP install. Apache and PHP are working fine. Individual html and php pages work fine, and behave as expected when server up by this WAMP distro -- except that I cannot get the form to be visible when I view the site locally. Any ideas or insight? Are there WAMP settings or modules that I might be missing for this?

OK -- that's question 1. Next up:

About half a second or a second after the form loads up (when viewed on my server), some of the content / text seems to re-settle itself, as if centering itself after initial display. Am I doing something wrong? Can this be prevented? I think you should be able to see this behavior if you look at the site at the link above.

Thanks in advance for any / all insight / help / advice.

- Jon

BTW - I tried, but the forum isn't happy with my attempt to upload the FB file, as it's more than 100k even when zipped (147kb).

I think it's has something to do with server speed and the responsive scripts. I see the same thing on a few of my larger forms.

Thanks Eric... I wonder if it's feasible to have the form load initially without being visible, adjust size, spacing, etc and then become visible? I wouldn't mind having it slide in, as long as the formatting was finished first.

Also... Re other issues I mention... Any idea if there are special libs, plug-ins, etc that I might be missing that make the form invisible when I run the exact same code under WAMP on my dev machine? It would save a lot of time if I could prototype and test locally rather than having to upload each time I want to see the form as it appears on the Web page.

I have used a few of my forms in WAMP. If I remember correctly the only thing I had issues with was permissions.

OK... That's a place for me to start looking. Any chance you might have more specific memories re what permissions needed tweaking? I'll do some more searching. Just never saw anything quite like this before. Thx...

I know it was a mysql issue and permissions but my forms all show fine in WAMP right out of the box.

I think I might have found the root cause of the problem...

I ran php.info on both my localhost installtion of php (under the AMPPS distro of WAMP) and on the GoDaddy server. As you'll recall, the web form shows properly on my html page when it's hosted on the GoDaddy server, but on my localhost installation, even though other php files execute and are interpreted properly, the WFB web form does NOT display on my html page.

I compared the php.info output from both installations. There were a few differences, so I googled each parameter where the setting was different. The significant settings seem to be:

magic_quotes_gpc

and

magic_quotes_runtime

These are both ON on GoDaddy's server, and OFF in my localhost WAMP installation.

The php magic quotes feature was their attempt at a global solution for escaping strings, made potentially complex if the string includes quotes (single or double). The can be an issue, for example, if a text string contains a quote - parsing can get screwed up, and MySQL text manipulations can get messed up too if un-escaped strings have quotes embedded.

In my search, I also found some posts here suggesting that magic_quotes_gpc MUST be enabled (as well as allow_url_fopen) for Web Form Builder to work correctly.

Anyway - I edited php.ini (local) and turned on magic_quotes_gpc. I also noted that magic_quotes_runtime is turned off locally, but it on when I look at GoDaddy's server. So -- I changed my php.ini setting to enable that as well.

Restart WAMP stack -- still have the problem. Some digging, and I find that, despite my settings:

- magic_quotes_gpc is now ON, but

- magic_quotes_runtime is OFF.

I searched my entire PC, and find all sorts of files, script add-ons, htaccess files, etc ALL with instructions to, essentially, turn magic_quotes off. I'm going to assume that one of these is responsible for overriding what I set in the php.ini file.

Some quick searching and reading tells me that the two magic_quotes features were determined to be potentially problematic: the features are deprecated, I believe as of PHP 5.4, and no longer exist in PHP 6 (from what I've read).

So -- the questions become:
- Is this the reason my web form doesn't show up when the html page holding it is loaded?
- Should I have to undo all the safety override functions and scripts that turn the feature off?
- If WFB depends on these now, how will WFB forms work as servers move toward PHP 6?

Anyone able to shed light on these, or confirm/deny that "magic quotes" is at the core of my problems with hosting the form locally?

Thanks in advance!
Jon

Might also want to post this as a support topic as I think this is something CoffeeCup gurus should look at. They may be able to give you an answer on this.

Yep...I've been trading some posts with Scott in the support forum too. Also did some more research, and it seems that those two functions are deprecated in recent releases of php... I also spent a while trying to override my WAMP install's settings, but it's dead set on keeping those features turned off locally... (I've tried .htaccess files, Apache allow overrides, etc. So far, no success...)