Message box with auto post to page

Hey all. New here to the forums because I need to up my php skills! So here's my first quest. I am looking for a way to create a message box, that will allow a user to input text, and have it post to the page without a complete refresh. I am assuming I'm going to need to implement some type of AJAX and/or jQuery with this as well? I'm not sure where to start. Is it possible to do it without writing to a DB? I did see one tutorial that wrote it to a messages.txt file, however, I could not get it to work.

perhaps you should try and start the "quest" first and then come back with some code to show us. no one is going to write code for you, But i may do it if you pay me $50.

You can write post content to a file using fopen() and fwrite().

You will need to look into jquery's $.post() function in order for your code to post without a refresh.

Tough love always works. Here is the code I have so far:

<?php
// The data file where messages are stored.
$dataf = "messages.txt";

// Max length of of messages
$length = 150;

// Number of messages shown.
$comments = 50;

$textsize = 4;

if (!$name)
{ $name = "||"; }
else $name .= ":";

$message = stripslashes($message);

$wrap = intval((20)/($textsize-2))+1;

$message = wordwrap($message, $wrap, ' ', 1);

$comfile = file($dataf);if ($message != "") {$df = fopen ($dataf, "w");

fwrite ($df, "<a href="mailto:$email">@</a>
<a href="/img_articles/10747/$url" target="_blank"><b> $name</b></a>
$messagen<br>");
for ($i = 0; $i < $comments; $i++) {fwrite ($df, $comfile[$i]);}fclose($df);}
Header("Location: $HTTP_REFERER");
?>

This code is included in a shout.php file. I also created a messages.txt file to write to. Then I created the following form:

<form method="POST" action="shout.php">
<table width="100%">
<tr>
<td>Name:</td>
<td><input size="17" maxlength=18 type="text" name="name"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>URL:</td>
<td><input size="17" maxlength="35" type="text" name="url" value="http://"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Email:</td>
<td>
<input size="17" maxlength="35" type="text" name="email" value="your@mail.com">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Message:</td>
<td><input size="17" maxlength="150" type="text" name="message"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2">
<center>
<input type="submit" value="Shout">
<input type="reset" value="Clear">
</td></tr></table>

I then inserted <?php include "messages.txt" ?> in my index.php file where I wanted the messages to show.

This all resulted in the page refreshing, and resulting in a 404 page. Couldn't figure out where it was going wrong. And I do realize that this does not include the jQuery. I'm not sure where to implement the jQuery code...

your 404 error is probably due to this:

Header("Location: $HTTP_REFERER");

$HTTP_REFERER doesnt exist in your script. Did you perhaps mean

header("Location: ".$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

You need to place the jquery code within your HTML. Heres a quick example. You will need to include the jQuery script, either download it from  their website or use googles CDN.

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
     $('form').submit(function(e){ // the below code will fire when the form is submitted
          e.preventDefault(); // don't send the form via HTTP method

           $.post('.shout.php', 
           {
                  name       :   $('input[name="name"]').val(),
                  url            :   $('input[name="url"]').val(),
                  email        :   $('input[name="email"]').val(),
                  message  :   $('input[name="message"]').val(),
           }, function(data) // data is what will be returned from shout.php
           {
                  alert(data); // do something with the data
            }
});
</script>

Then in shout.php instead of using header() to redirect them simply echo something to be sent back to the client script

echo 'Form submitted';

You will then get an alert saying Form submitted.