I keep reading on this forum how embedding PHP opens doors for additional Sparkle functionality. I’d like to give it a try. My use case is form validation. When someone enters an email address, I want to be able to request a confirmation in some manner whether it is comparing to a second data entry field or with a pop up echo’ing back the entered value.
Can anyone suggest resources to learn PHP on a Mac for use in Sparkle?
I assume one resource won’t do it and I understand my Mac’s PHP is at risk of disappearing with Monterey (why?)
Hi @DaverD, in general I wouldn’t know that PHP opens many doors in Sparkle’s specific case.
I think you are also in a situation where your knowledge of coding things is that you don’t what you don’t know yet. Yes coding lets you do just about anything, but you would need to know a spectrum of things to understand what’s the best way to approach want to solve.
My guess is that field validation would require Javascript (to do it in the browser page), HTML/CSS and Javascript (to display something on the page). These would be possible in an embed block most likely. Then you’d need PHP (to also validate things on the server).
Also since Sparkle’s built-in contact form has no provisions for customizing the code, you would either have to edit the exported thank you page, or change it to an advanced form and built the thank you page from scratch.
We do want to add form validation for specific content types (email address is an obvious one), like with all Sparkle features it’s taking longer than we would like.
With all this, I don’t want to discourage you from learning new things, we just can’t really support the learning process. Sparkle was built with the idea that you don’t really need to learn any coding, though clearly there’s no other way where Sparkle falls short, until we get around to adding what you need.