Planning Document for Final Exam

Task A

There are two different tasks that we had to solve in order to better complete PHP Motors Administration structure; the one, task B, being a CAPTCHA for the Contaact page to fiter spambots and the other, task C, to create a Reply page and mechinism in the Administraion section in order to reply back to any emails recieved from customers or potential customers. This planning document will briefly explain the problems and solutions encountered with each of the tasks and the thought process behind the decisions of the solutions.

Task B - CAPTCHA

The problem with the contact page was that it was susceptible to spambots and other spyware that could flood my database with unwanted marketing and advertisements. By adding a CAPTCHA, there is less of a risk of having a bot entering information and sending to me. To find information on implementing a CAPTCHA to the contact page, I used wonderful Google search and looked up free CAPTCHA. I found one that was very user friendly and had different versions depending on the programming language that you want to use. I looked up a PHP version and it gave me two pieces of code to paste; one snippet was for the form which also included a user-friendly reload link to refresh the CAPTCHA images and the other was for the error checking and passing for the PHP. It was really pretty simple to implement and it didn't take long. You can see the CAPTCHA by clicking here.

Task C - Reply implementation

This issue was a bit harder for me but this was my thought process behind the issue and solution. We have a working Contact page that will save the message and an ID depending on the standing of the sender; whether they were a potential customer or a regular customer. Because of the uncertianty of who was sending the message, we had three different tables that are updating. The idea is to have a reply page on the Administration so that you can access all the messages and reply back to them using the mesage ID. Now this is what I was thinking:

  1. Click on the reply link of the said message you have received.
  2. You should go to a "reply to messages" page that already sets the ID and name of the person who sent the message and their email in the background and a box for the employee to reply in.
  3. Upon clicking send, this should take you to a confirmation page saying the the reply was sent.
  4. Now if you were to go back to the messages page there should be an updated sign or word saying that this message had been replied to.
  5. In the reply table in the database, one of the ID should correlate with the person you replied to and your reply message.

However, upon reviewing the database tables and working on the code, I could not create the solution. My problem is that I would get 500 Internal Server Errors and I can not figure out how to fix it.

You can access the reply option from a level 2 or level 3 employee so what I mean. Just login with these credentials: