What am I looking for? (sorry to have to ask!)

Status
Not open for further replies.
T

ThreeFallingDucks

Member
Superhuman Ninja Coders amongst you (or those that are a couple hours of Youtube tutorials ahead of me),

My charity has just been quoted £12K for adding an extra couple of pages to our website. We have asked for a page to be added containing a simple box, which when a certain word has been typed into it, you are automatically sent on to another page.

Think of the human verification on the search area of GDF - the 'design or dezeen' question - we simply want that and nothing else on the page, and upon entering the magic word, you are sent to another page.

The reasoning for it is to get a section of our volunteers (the old 'n' bold, who are not used to using computers) into the habit of using a password. Clearly this is completely unsecure - anyone can go directly to the second page by merely typing in the url, or by being told the universal login word, but that is fine with us. We are planning a brand new, much larger (six figures!!) website in the coming months, for which they will need to login to use.

The CMS on the site is pretty bad, but I'm confident that I can work out where to add the code for it. I've found lots of free code to do a full human verification (with database of questions - I guess they are CAPTCHA alternatives), but nothing as simple as this. I think that it would take me a while to work out how to creat it. As such, my question is this - does anyone know what I should be looking for, and if so where I may find it? Advice on the first question is priority - I can search!

So sorry that this is such a lowly noob question, but I've spent the past hour looking for answers, and I'm getting behind with my actual job. But I'll be damned if we pay £12K of charity money on an unscrupulous web design company.

Thanks for any advice - and will fully understand if you tell me that this is not the place for such ridiculous questions, and I should hire someone immediately.
 
£12k sounds ridiculous for what it is though, even more so if you're changing sites soon anyway. Although I can't help you on the specific issue, I wouldn't want to be investing in something you're about to get rid of, especially for something so small and certainly not for such a high price.
 
Really PHP is your option here and you'd need a database table with your 'magic word' in it to compare it to. Then use a session to allow access to the page in question or to kick people out if they are not 'logged in'. You'd probably require a text input and a submit button to do this. You could try it client-side (as opposed to PHP server-side) with javascript but that can have some unpredictable results depending on browser settings.
 
For £12k even I'd try and understand what Corrosive just said and do it for you!! lol

Boss is right though, pop a request in the tenders section and see what comes of it.
 
Thanks all for your posts. Unfortunately we really need this to sit on our current site, so it's a case of using that company, or trying to do something using our access to the CMS. Which I guess means that I wouldn't be able to use Corrosive's excellent (albeit not one I could easily do myself) suggestion. I will sound out the Director to see if we can put it out to tender, but I'm not confident of being able bring anyone new into this.

I also run another website for the charity, and the developer for that one has offered to add the following:
- A two page website (a ‘welcome’ page and a ‘downloads’ page)
- A content management system (CMS) to enable you to add and remove files/documents/forms/etc.
- A user management/login system
- The ability to export user data for use in email marketing, etc.

He said that this will be 3 - 4 days work at £1200 + vat. Does that sound like a sensible quote?

In trying to not spend anything until we go for the big one I'm wondering if there are any workarounds I could put in place myself - with a Wordpress plugin for human verification, could I take out all of the questions bar one, and change that answer to the universal password? I figure that if we have to have an external website, I may as well put it together myself - I can then at least make it look very similar to our current site. Or am I barking up the wrong tree with the human verification thing completely?

Sorry to follow a question with a question, but thanks all!
 
Cheers Corrosive :thumb:

Erm, I think I might have an hilariously simple idea (google is a duplicate webpage with error message, and yahoo is the target page. The magic word is 'beer') :

<html>
<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com" onsubmit="if(this.elements['q'].value == 'beer'){ this.action = 'http://www.yahoo.com'; }">

<input type="text" name="q" size="31"
maxlength="255" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Go" />


</form>
</html>
 
That would do the very basics of what you want, yep. It won't secure 'Yahoo' (if you see what I mean) but it should handle the redirection. As you aren't bothered about securing it as such and it is a training aid then go for it. Just make sure your visitors have javascript enabled!
 
Thanks Corrosive.

Unfortunately it won't work - I add it to the CMS and it automatically changed to this:

<form action="http://www.google.com" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="get"><input maxlength="255" name="q" size="31" type="text" /> <input type="submit" value="Go" /> </form>

This is beyond me. I have asked our web providers helpdesk, but they don't seem to want to help me (strange that, considering they have quoted 12K for their 'solution').

I'll keep searching... sob.
 
You are welcome. I learnt that one the hard way trying to get a file attachment to send as part of a form2mail once. Took me hours to figure out what was wrong!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top