The mailmerge.cgi script makes it very easy to create your own customized mail response forms, guestbooks, surveys or order forms. Previously, you could not specify the exact output of your response. With the mailmerge.cgi, you have total control over the format of both your input form that is presented to the user and the resulting answers from the user.

Mailmerge also uses templates to not only define the input form, but also format the final output. This makes it easy to customize Mailmerge to fit your needs.

The HTML syntax for calling the Mailmerge.cgi from your page is as follows:

<A HREF="/cgi-bin/mailmerge.cgi/username/yourtemplatefile.tpl"> Fill out the user comment form </A>

Where username is your web directory on Hevanet and yourtemplatefile.tpl is the name of your template file in your web directory. If you wish to have your templates in a subdirectory, make sure you include that subdirectory in the path. ie: "/cgi-bin/mailmerge.cgi/username/subdir/yourtemplatefile.tpl"

The template file contains all the information that Mailmerge needs to process your form. In fact, you can even define your form in the template and it will be presented to the user "on the fly". If you would like to see some examples of templates, just click on the following. They are simple text, so you can cut/paste or save them to a file.

NOTE: When you upload the template (.tpl) file to your web directory, be sure to use ASCII or TEXT mode in your FTP program. If you don't, you will have problems with the template working correctly.

example1 a product order form.

You can also check out the official Mailmerge site. It gives very detailed information on how to use the script and all of it’s capabilities.