Ways to set up a simple inventory form quickly

Question

I needed a simple inventory form of sort on my website where visitors could enter their information, pick the item they wanted and then submit the form and dispatch an email. The information will be updated in a database and then I can just verify the records in the database from another form when I confirm their payments manually.

Since it isn't a full scale inventory or online shop system and it is going to be just a temporary thing, I feel like I want to do something like that in the shortest time. If create this thing in PHP I thought it may take quite some time to set up the forms, put in the form validations, and then programme the form logic with the inputs and database, etc.

Are there other quicker and smarter solutions to create such a simple form quickly?

Answer 1

The best solution is to take the time to do the form coding yourself, if you are using a framework or CMS you should be able to get 90% of the way their pretty quick. Doing it yourself means you can stand over the results 100% and you don't have to rely on anyone elses code or system.

That being said, if you really want to speed things up;

The database part of it makes this pretty non-standard, but you could use a third party tool like Wufoo for your forms, this could do the form generation and handle validation and emails but you would need to then manually approve the order and do whatever else the database needed to do.