The Technical Equivalent of a Hammer on my Thumb

Caveat – I am not now, nor have I ever maintained, that I am a coder. My programming classes were taken nearly half a lifetime ago in a strange little language called Ada.

I knew what I was getting into when I volunteered to help some friends overhaul the web site of their production company in advance of their new play. Artistic types are notoriously hard to pin down, and prying details from them is like trying to get a handle on a muddy piglet. I pulled down a copy of the old site, started brushing up on Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and managed to make a fair amount of progress pretty quickly. Thanks to a suggestion from my buddy Brock, I got a test instance of the site up & running PDQ using MAMP.

Once the basic web site was up, then the requests started rolling in –   “Can we do a reservations page?”. Me: “Sure, it can’t be that difficult”.  I poked and prodded around the Web for samples of how to use PHP to use formmail functionality to generate an email without the need for an email client (unlike mailto functionality). I hacked together an HTML form and a PHP mail processor using code snippets I stincorporated from various web sites.  I tested it locally, and surprisingly it worked.

Then I install the files on my web host, GoDaddy, and test it out. Crickets. Nothing happens. Rather than wasting time digging through their usually unfriendly Help Center, I call them. So it turns out that I can’t use custom formmail processors…I have to use THEIR files. I can’t customize them at all, and I can’t direct the resulting form to any email but the official email associated with the account (or so the CSR tells me). As the great philosopher Oliver Hardy used to say, “Isn’t this a fine mess?”. So now I have a web site that’s going to be different in its dev/test & production environments, one that I can’t even really test since I don’t have access to GoDaddy’s code or what’s happening behind the scenes.

Now, I can appreciate that GoDaddy probably doesn’t want to give people on shared Linux servers carte blanche to run programs on their web sites, but this seems at best an inelegant way to achieve this.  Their documentation on the subject is spare, to say the least. Some of my test submissions are going through, while others are not.  I’m not sure what, if any, kind of validation they do on the back end, but it makes testing the solution difficult.  Color me thoroughly unimpressed.