Specific Layouts from Forms

[pm04sss]

Please feel free to let me know who to better direct this to if not possible in Dw!

I am hoping to create a contact form which has 2 separate comment boxes and 3 separate submission boxes (where someone can upload their pictures). What I am looking for is a way that I can get dreamweaver to email me this information (two paragraphs and three pictures) in a specific layout - i.e. each person's submission to come in the same layout - such as the two paragraphs on the left side and the three pictures on the right side so that they all fit neatly in a box I can then insert into InDesign.

Essentially I'm creating a magazine month-by-month and hoping to spare myself the hassle of manually doing that each month to each person's submission!

Now I write it down and reread it I'm less convinced that this is possible in Dw! If anyone knows if it is or what program I would require to do this please feel free to send along suggestions! I may have to hire a programmer to do it?!

Thanks!

S.

[Nancy OShea]

Anything is possible in DW if you have the right kind of web hosting plan and sufficient programming skills.  There is no magic button that can do all of this for you however. 

Which server-side scripts can you use with your hosting plan?  If unsure, ask your web host.

Also find out if your your hosting plan permits the public to upload files to your server and if so what is the maximum file size?  Some shared hosting plans won't allow just anybody to upload files for security reasons.

[Rob Hecker2 · Accepted solution]

Dreamweaver is not a technology, it's a set of tools. It is a set of tools which can be used to create and process a form such as what you have described.You will need to know how to create forms with HTML, how to process them with PHP or AJAX, and how to work with XML documents.

You will import the images and text into Indesign in the XML format. inDesign works well with XML and so does the web.

You say you want this material emailed to you, but it would be far more efficient to have the text uploaded to a database and the images uploaded to a folder on the server.

You will also need to know how to allow people to upload images in a way that will not allow hackers to hijack the web server.

I once created a process where people were able to create an annual calendar of events for the web. Each event had a date, price, title, description, presenter and photo. There were about 200 events per year. Then it could all be imported into InDesign in XML format. It would take a few hours to go through the InDesign document and tweak the content and fix the formatting. So what you want to achieve is the kind of thing that can be done. But altogether it takes a fairly high level of skill.