There are several tutorials on the Internet on how-to integrate the Google Custom search in your website, but the results are not very attractive. The older iframe version doesn’t fit perfectly in most of our templates and the style for ads and results doesn’t look good in the past. A few month Google has released some nice new features:

• Custom search element placements
• Custom styles and themes using CSS
• Promotions, set your own premium results for specific search queries
• A new AJAX powered CSE using the Google AJAX API loader

With all these new features the CSE (Custom Search Engine) becomes very attractive to use it on your own site as site search. In this tutorial we show you how-to add the custom search feature to you site using jQuery, the Thickbox plugin and the AJAX API provided by Google. To do this a result page is not necessary anymore, we show only a search box somewhere on a particular website.

Including the Google API, jQuery and the Thickbox plugin

First include the following rows to your page HEAD, you need to add them on every page where you like to show the search box.

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="thickbox.css" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="thickbox.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOURAPYKEY"></script>

To use the Google API you need to register an API key for your website, request a key here.

HTML code for the search box

Below the simple HTML code for the search form and the container for the results. Place both somewhere on your webpage.

<div id="searchcont">
	<label for="query_input">Search Query: </label>
	<input type="text" id="query_input" />
	<input type="button" value="ok" id="searchbtn" />
</div>
<div id="resultcont">
	<div id="title" style="visibility:hidden;"><a href="#">Close</a></div>
	<div id="results"></div>
</div>

jQuery code snippet

The following JS code will load the Google API and if the user has clicked the search button the customSearchControl is initiated, the Thickbox is called, the title inside the Thickbox becomes visible, the result element is prepared and at last the input element value is executed for the search query. Add this code in your page’s HEAD surrounded by some script tags.

google.load('search', '1');
$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#searchbtn").click(function () {
		var customSearchControl = new google.search.CustomSearchControl('UNIQUE_CSE_ID');
		tb_show("", "#TB_inline?height=480&width=800&inlineId=resultcont&modal=true");
		$('#title').css("visibility", "visible");   
		var drawOptions = new google.search.DrawOptions();
		customSearchControl.draw(document.getElementById("results"), drawOptions);
		customSearchControl.execute(document.getElementById("query_input").value);
	});
	$("#title a").click(function () {
		tb_remove();
		$('#title').css("visibility", "hidden");   
		$("#results").hide();
	});
});

The other click event is used to hide the Thickbox, the event will hide the title and hides also the results. The last action is needed because we show an inline element, if we don’t hide the content the results are still visible after the Thickbox is closed.

That’s all, simple or not? The code above needs of course some styling. I used a slightly modified version for my network site search on this blog. If you search for “wordpress” you see the “promotion” feature I mentioned above.

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• jQuery Contact form for your website

These days it’s very hard to prevent your e-mail box against spam if you like to get in touch with your website’s visitors. If you place some e-mail address on your website or even a regular contact form makes you possibly a victim of spambots. There are many ways to protect your inbox against spam, spam filters and protections on your contact form page will help for sure.

In this tutorial we show how to create a modern contact form that is linked by a simple text link and opens in a fancy Lightbox where all form handling, including reCAPTCHA validations, are processed by PHP and the jQuery Ajax function. After the form submission was successful we are using the PHP Class script PHPMailer to send the message via SMTP.

Previous Tutorials we have used for this application

Create custom reCAPTCHA images using their API
We use the reCAPTCHA API to create a user validation image to protect the form against spam attacks.

Sending e-mails via SMTP with PHPmailer and Gmail
We send e-mail messages using the PHPmailer script via SMTP, the mail function from this previous tutorial is the base for this tutorial as well.

Next we use the Ajax function from jQuery to send the form variables to our PHP e-mail script. This tutorial describes how-to to use all the functions in one application, please check the other tutorials if you need more information. We will not explain the code for PHPMailer and reCAPTCHA in this tutorial. You need an API key for the reCAPTCHA service.

Thickbox jQuery Plugin

We use the Thickbox plugin for this tutorial because we think that this plugin is easy to use and very flexible. If you visit the Thickbox website you will notice some “warning” from the developer, he says that he doesn’t continue the development. If you don’t like to use the Thickbox plugin you need to use one of the other Lightbox plugins available on the Internet. Since the application is not related to the Thickbox plugin, it should be easy to use that code with most other Lightbox scripts as well.

Contact form

This page is used to collect the users input, will validate the input on the client side and will post the data to the PHP e-mail script. Create a file with this code and call it contact-form.html

<html>
<head>
<title>Contact form</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://api.recaptcha.net/js/recaptcha_ajax.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">

Next we have the jQuery script block for the form validations, Ajax form submission and the code to request the challenge image from the reCAPTCHA API.

After the document is loaded the reCAPTCHA images is added. If the user has clicked the button #submit_button the Ajax function is called with:

• Options like the PHP e-mail script,
• the form data,
• the data type JSON,
• a pre-submit handler for the form field validations
• and a success handler that put the response into the #output container.

$(document).ready(function() { 	
	var RecaptchaOptions = { theme : 'custom' };
 	Recaptcha.create('your public key', 'recaptcha_image', RecaptchaOptions);
 	Recaptcha.focus_response_field();
	$('#submit_button').click(function() { 
		$.ajax({
			type: 'POST',
			url: 'email.php',
			data: $('form#myform').serialize(),
			dataType: 'json',
			beforeSend: function() {
				var resp_field = $('#recaptcha_response_field').val();
				var name = $('#name').val();
				var email = $('#email').val();
				var message = $('#message').val();
				if (!resp_field[0] || !name[0] || !email[0] || !message[0]) { 
					$('#output').html('All fields are required');
					return false; 
				}
				emailpat = /^([a-z0-9])+([\.a-z0-9_-])*@([a-z0-9])+(\.[a-z0-9_-]+)+$/i;
				if (!emailpat.test(email)) {
					$('#output').html('The e-mail address is not valid.'); 
					return false;
				}
			},
			success: function(response) {
				if (response.status == 'success') {
					$('#formcont').html();
				}
				$('#output').html(response.errmessage);
			}
		});
	});
});

The form has just a few fields for name, e-mail address and message. Note the container with the ID recaptcha_image, this DIV element holds the reCAPTCHA challenge image.

</script>
</head>
<body>
	<h1>Contact form</h1>
	<div id="formcont">				
		<form id="myform">
			<p>
				<label for="naam">Name:</label>
				<input type="text" name="name" id="name" size="30" />
			</p>
			<p>
				<label for="email">E-mail:</label>
				<input type="text" name="email" id="email" size="30" />
			</p>
			<p>
				<label for="message">Message:</label>
				<textarea rows="5" cols="30" name="message" id="message"></textarea>
			</p>
			<div id="recaptcha_image"></div>
			<p>
				<input type="text" name="recaptcha_response_field" id="recaptcha_response_field" size="20" />
				<input type="button" value="Submit" id="submit_button" /> 
			</p>
		</form>
	</div>
	<div id="output"></div>
</body>
</html>

PHP e-mail script

So far the client side code, now we need an email script called email.php with following functions:

• One that validates the submitted reCAPTCHA answer against the API,
• has some basic validations on the server side (empty fields)
• sends the e-mail message using the PHPmailer class,
• and responds (echo) the message in JSON format.

<?php
require_once('PHPMailer/class.phpmailer.php');
$resp['status'] = 'error';
$resp['errmessage'] = '';
 
if (!empty($_POST)) {
	if (!empty($_POST['email']) && !empty($_POST['message']) && !empty($_POST['name']) && !empty($_POST['recaptcha_response_field'])) {
		$answer = trim(stripslashes($_POST['recaptcha_response_field']));
		$postData['challenge'] = $_POST['recaptcha_challenge_field'];	
		$postData['response'] = urlencode($answer);
		$postData['remoteip'] = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
		$postData['privatekey'] = 'your private key';
		$ch = curl_init("http://api-verify.recaptcha.net/verify");
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postData);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		$data = curl_exec($ch);
		curl_close($ch);
		$response = explode(PHP_EOL, $data);
		if ($response[0] == 'true') {
			$mail = new PHPMailer();
			$mail->IsSMTP(); // enable SMTP
			$mail->SMTPDebug = 0;  // debugging: 1 = errors and messages, 2 = messages only
			$mail->SMTPAuth = true;  // authentication enabled
			$mail->SMTPSecure = 'ssl'; // secure transfer enabled REQUIRED for Gmail
			$mail->Host = 'smtp.gmail.com';
			$mail->Port = 465; 
			$mail->Username = 'you at gmail dot com';
			$mail->Password = 'your gmail password';      
			$mail->SetFrom('you@website.com'); 
			$mail->Body = 'Name: '.$_POST['name'] . PHP_EOL . 
				'E-mail: ' . $_POST['email'] . PHP_EOL . PHP_EOL . 
				'Message:' . PHP_EOL . $_POST['message'];
			$mail->Subject = 'Some message from your site';
			$mail->AddAddress('Igetthe@mail.com');
			if (!$mail->Send()) {
				$resp['errmessage'] = 'Mail error: '.$mail->ErrorInfo;
				$resp['status'] = 'success';
			} else {
				$resp['errmessage'] = 'Message submitted succesfully!';
			}
		} else {
			if ($response[1] == 'incorrect-captcha-sol') {
				$resp['errmessage'] = 'The entered text from the Captcha image is wrong.';
			} else {
				$resp['errmessage'] = 'Can\'t validate the Captcha image.';
			}
		}
	} else {
		$resp['errmessage'] = 'Missing required fields!';
	}
} 
echo json_encode($resp);
?>

How-to use it on your website?

if you have finished both files you can use them on your site, upload the two created files, the jQuery library, the Thickbox plugin files and the PHPmailer class (if you don’t have those files on your server). Double check all the paths and add the jQuery library and the Thickbox plugin files to the page header from that page, where you like to place one or more Contact links:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="thickbox.js"></script>
<link href="thickbox.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

You don’t need to add more jQuery code because the code is already included in the Thickbox plugin file. Use the following code for each link:

<a href="contact-form.html?TB_iframe=true&height=480&width=640" class="thickbox">Contact</a>

That’s all, if you have any questions please post them below. At the moment there is no demo but you can download the example code here.

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Do you publish your blogs with WordPress? If yes, you know the inline popup window which opens if you like to upload / insert an image into your article. This tutorial shows you how-to use the jQuery Plugin ThickBox and some jQuery code to upload a file and pass a value to the parent page. You can use this kind of feature in your custom CMS or maybe you like use it as a basic for your own file upload plugin or gadget?

Scripts and libraries used in this tutorial

PHP Upload Class / Script
We use this PHP Script written by our partner finalwebsites.com because it’s very powerful and easy to use. Since the upload process is not the difficult part in this tutorial you might use your own PHP upload code instead.

jQuery JavaScript Library
There are several client side libraries available on the Internet, I like jQuery because there are many resources and cool plugins.

ThickBox – webpage UI dialog widget
I tried several Lightbox types and since a while I use the ThickBox plugin. For the upload process, we need modal window which will open as an Iframe.

Our dynamic form (form.php)

Most forms process some data for a database or they send the data within an e-mail message. In our example we have a form with just two form fields one for a name tag and one for the file name.

<form action="form.php" method="post">
	<p>
		<label for="nametag">Name</label>
		<input type="text" name="nametag" size="20" />
	</p>
	<p>
		<label for="myfile">File name</label>
		<input type ="text" id="myfile" name="myfile" readonly="readonly" />
 		 <a href="upload.php?placeValuesBeforeTB_=savedValues&TB_iframe=true&height=300&width=400&modal=true" class="thickbox">Upload</a>
 	</p>
 	<p style="text-align:right;"><input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Send" /></p>
</form>

Notice the attributes and the URL used inside the link element to our upload script. We set the ThickBox size, we enable the values for iframe and modal. We used also some ID for the “readonly” form field which is used to store the filename after the upload is done. We added also a form action because we need to process the form afterwards.

The upload script (upload.php)

After the user has clicked the upload link, a lightbox will open an Iframe holding the upload script. First we show the code which is responsible for the upload process.

include_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/pathtotheclass/upload_class.php';
$error = '';
$img = '';
$copy_link = '';
 
if(isset($_POST['Submit'])) {
	$my_upload = new file_upload;
	$my_upload->upload_dir = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/modal-upload/files/";
	$my_upload->extensions = array(".png", ".jpg", ".gif"); // allowed extensions
	$my_upload->rename_file = true;
	$my_upload->the_temp_file = $_FILES['upload']['tmp_name'];
	$my_upload->the_file = $_FILES['upload']['name'];
	$my_upload->http_error = $_FILES['upload']['error'];
	if ($my_upload->upload()) {
		$image = $my_upload->file_copy;
		$copy_link = ' | <a id="closelink" href="#" onclick="self.parent.tb_remove();">Pass file name</a>';
	} 
	$error = $my_upload->show_error_string();
}

You will find several example files if you download the upload class from finalwebsites. For this tutorial we will explain the most important variables and methods.

$my_upload->upload_dir
This upload directory is important, while most webhosts don’t allow that Apache has write access to directories, you need to chmod the directory with 777. If this directory doesn’t exists the upload will fail.

$my_upload->extensions
Allow only the extensions you need in your application, in our example we need to retrieve the image’s filename.

$my_upload->rename_file
Your users might have file names with spaces or foreign characters, use this option to rename your uploaded file to an URL-safe string.

$my_upload->file_copy
The (new) name generated by a successful upload, use this name in your further application process.

Let’s check the upload form:

<form action="upload.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
	<p>
		<label for="upload">Select file</label>
		<input name="upload" type="file" size="15" />
		<br />
		<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Upload" />
	</p>
</form>
<p><?php echo $error; ?></p>
<p><a href="#" onclick="self.parent.tb_remove();">Cancel</a><?php echo $copy_link; ?></p>

Because this is an upload form, you need add the “enctype” attribute “multipart/form-data”, otherwise the file will not be uploaded to your server. You see two link elements below the form, one is static to cancel/close the upload dialog and the other one is generated by PHP after the upload is done and gets the ID “closelink”. This ID is important for the following jQuery function:

$(document).ready(function() { 
	$("#closelink").click(function() {
		$("#myfile", top.document).val('<?php echo $image; ?>');
	});
});

If the user clicks the link with the ID “closelink”, the filename is passed to top document’s element with the ID “myfile” and the ThickBox gets closed. With the completed form we’re able to process the data inside the parent document. We added this php upload demo to our partners site, which will demonstrate the “modal effect”. If you like to use the files from this tutorial, you can download the “form.php” and “upload.php” files from the php forum. If you have questions or suggestions, please post them them below.

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