1 Another approach with oowriter

I absolutely agree that it’s vital to webbusiness to make contracting easy. Since the most secure way to contract still is a underwritten document I use an efficient way to create the contract on the fly:

(1) Create an OpenOffice Doc containing your contract with some “variables”. Unzip the saved oo doc, you’ll find a content.xml file containing your “variables” in plain text.

(2) In your PHP backend, present the contact’s options to your customer. On submit, load the template contract’s content.xml and substitute your “variables” with the values/choices of your current customer.

(3) In your PHP backend, pack-zip your oo doc (ie with zib.lib.php) and call oowriter to produce a PDF file from your modified contract template.

(4) Deliver the PDF to your potential client’s browser to make her print it, underwrite it and finally fax it.

I found this to be the most simple – while professional and legally reliable (german law) way to contract in the web.

posted at 08:34 am on December 8, 2009 by proxiss

2 Echosign

Or you could just use http://www.echosign.com — I’m not a salesman, promise! We use them at my agency, it’s pretty cheap, professional, and has dramatically reduced both our sign-off times and the number of sign-offs we can send (contract, order form, design, testing, go live, project completion).

posted at 08:45 am on December 8, 2009 by borrodell.com

3 Overegging the Pudding?

I may be being naive here, but if I send my terms & conditions document and require that the client responds in an email affirming those Ts & Cs, have I not achieved the same thing?

posted at 09:49 am on December 8, 2009 by Phil Houghton

4 Matter of trust

@3: Everything is easy before it comes to court. If you need to submit evidence email won’t work…

posted at 10:28 am on December 8, 2009 by proxiss

5 Legal eSignatures

Full disclosure: I work for and electronic signature vendor, eOriginal (www.eoriginal.com).

Electronic signatures are a great way to improve and speed up your business processes, however to make your documents legally admissible in court there are a few steps in the process that must be taken to ensure that your documents hold up to a legal challenge. I could get into all that here but it would make for a very long comment stream. But if you would like more information or have any legal questions you can view our compliance information http://www.eoriginal.com/solutions/legal.php, it may clear up a few questions.

posted at 11:17 am on December 8, 2009 by Palubins

6 Evidence

Proxiss – Doesn’t the author quote a lawyer stating that reciving a mail back is good enough?

posted at 11:19 am on December 8, 2009 by Tor Løvskogen

7 E-mail confirmation + downpayment

Hi.

I require from my clients an e-mail confirmation with the quote attached, and a downpayment (by check). That’s enough legal evidence (at least in France).

Regards.

posted at 02:08 pm on December 8, 2009 by Rndmerle

8 Preview

A lot of us Mac folks use Preview to view PDF files. Acrobat is massive and slow on the Mac — or so I’ve been told. Preview would not have the capabilities to submit the form, but of course it would still be readable. Just something to be aware of.

posted at 03:14 pm on December 8, 2009 by Michael Newton

9 unsanitized data

I realize this is a bit off topic but posting php examples with incomplete data sanitization is not good.

“Thank you, “.$_POST[‘accepters_name’].”! Your acceptance» “

This is especially confusing as your very next block of code does some sanitization.

I really enjoy the content and A List Apart and consider it a top notch resource for quality examples. In the future when providing examples that make use of php and $_POST/$_GET you could also reiterate the importance of sanitized data by including an extra 7 lines of code for data sanitization:

$post = array();
//filter post data once we get, filtyers out any unwanted html tags the user may submit as well as converting entities back to characters.
foreach($_POST as $k => $v)
{ $post[$k] = trim(strip_tags(html_entity_decode($v, ENT_QUOTES)));
}

/*
. . . .
do whatever php your page needs here using the $post array you just built instead of $_POST
. . . . */

//make the output safer with htmlentities before we go echoing it back tp our html
foreach($_POST as $k => $v)
{ $post[$k] = htmlentities(stripslashes($string), ENT_QUOTES);
}
//end php block and begin our html output if echoing $_POST data back to the form once again use the $post array you created

posted at 05:39 pm on December 8, 2009 by EricWilson