Help me with a simple newsletter subscription form?

The newsletter subscription form I am working on can be found in the footer at this link.

Currently, when the form is submitted, the error/success message displays on a new page.

Instead I would like for the error/success message to display directly below the form in the footer.

IE. If a user enters the email address name@website.com, the text "Success" should display below the input field instead of on a new page.

Help would be greatly appreciated!

Here's what I've got now:

In the Header

<script>
function submitEmail() {

    var email = $('#emailText').val();

    jQuery.post('/common/php/send_news.php', {
        email: email
    },function(data){
        $('#submissionResponse').html(data);
    },html);

}
</script>

FORM

<form method="post">
        <fieldset>
        <h3></h3>
        <input type="text" name="email" maxlength="80" class="input" value="enter your email address..." onfocus="this.className=('input_active')" onblur="this.classN开发者_如何学编程ame=('input')" onclick="this.value='';" />
        <input type="button" name="submit"  value="" class="subscribe_btn" onmouseover="this.className=('subscribe_btn_over')" onmouseout="this.className=('subscribe_btn')" onclick="submitEmail();" />
        <small>*we will not share your email address</small><span class="clear"></span>
        </fieldset>
      </form>
      <div id="submissionResponse"></div>

send_news.php

<?php
if(isset($_POST['email'])) {

    // EDIT THE 2 LINES BELOW AS REQUIRED
    $email_to = "test@emailtest.com";
    $email_subject = "Newsletter Subscription";


    function died($error) {
        // your error code can go here
        echo "There was an error with your submission";
        echo $error."<br /><br />";
        die();
    }

    // validation expected data exists
    if(
        !isset($_POST['email'])) {
        died('There was an error with your submission');       
    }

    $email_from = $_POST['email']; // required


    $error_message = "";
    $email_exp = '/^[A-Za-z0-9._%-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,4}$/';
  if(!preg_match($email_exp,$email_from)) {
    $error_message .= 'The Email Address you entered does not appear to be valid.<br />';
  }

  if(strlen($error_message) > 0) {
    died($error_message);
  }
    $email_message = "Form details below.\n\n";

    function clean_string($string) {
      $bad = array("content-type","bcc:","to:","cc:","href");
      return str_replace($bad,"",$string);
    }

    $email_message .= "Email: ".clean_string($email_from)."\n";


// create email headers
$headers = 'From: '.$email_from."\r\n".
'Reply-To: '.$email_from."\r\n" .
'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
@mail($email_to, $email_subject, $email_message, $headers);  
?>

<!-- include your own success html here -->

Thanks for signup up for the Newsletter!

<?php
}
?>

---

What I would do is setup a simple page that echos Success or Fail, then pass the information to that page from the form using an Ajax call--You can use jQuery to accomplish this goal.

Add this to the header in either a javascript file, or a script tag:

function submitEmail() {

    var email = $('#emailText').val();

    jQuery.post('/submission.php', {
        email: email
    },function(data){
        $('#submissionResponse').html(data);
    },html);

}

Then alter the form so that the submission button is like so:

<input type="button" name="submit" value="Submit" onclick="submitEmail();" />

Then add a div below the form with the id "submissionResponse" like so:

<div id="submissionResponse"></div>

This way you will be able to handle the post just like you do when you change pages, but you will automatically submit the data and grab the response.

---

ANOTHER EDIT:

While I'm at it, I might as well give another way to do similar. You could, instead of using Ajax, do exactly what you do now, but direct the form to reload the current page (action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>") and then at the top of this page add

if(isset($_POST['email'])){
    include('submission.php');
}

and underneath the form have:

<div id="formStatus"><?php echo isset($formStatusResponse) ? $formStatusResponse : null; ?></div>

Two ways to accomplish the same goal. Using Ajax is faster, as it only requires the end user to load a single line of text, where as the second method requires the complete reloading of the entire page.

---

If you wish to do this, you need to use something like an AJAX POST submission, instead of a normal form POST submission. Then you can put the response text anywhere you wish to indicate an error or success condition.