Hey guys, I was wondering if I might be able to get some help. I need to design a system the allows visitors to my site to send a recommendation email to their friends. The email should provide a link back to the site which times how long they spend on the page, and allows the person who sent the original email to access this statistic.

I imagine the person sending the email will be given a code that they can enter to track each individual email sent, rather than signing up to the site and having everything saved in a profile.

Is this a difficult thing to create? I have very little knowledge of coding PHP - I have used it a lot in CMS's, but I've never really coded anything from scratch.

I have found that from experience people don't use those "click here to send to a friend" link. If they really like your website they will send it on their own with their email client or through IM. That being said... if you really want to go forward with it it's not very hard to create using php's mail() function.

Personally, I wouldn't bother but that's just me.

Pod.

I realise that, but it's an important feature in my site, so I would really like to do this.

Would your suggestion cover the time counter too?

For the time counter I would put a hidden input into the form that has the current time when the page loads, then when the submit button is pressed get the time of that. Then you'll know how long the page was loaded.

PHP Code:

<input type="hidden" value="<?php echo time();?>">

Which submit button is that?

Will that method give an accurate display of the time actually spent on the page, or just when they first loaded it?

kbfirebreather's suggestion is almost there. It wouldn't work if the user keeps refreshing the page (The time will refresh as well).
I think you will need a session object to keep track.

PHP Code:

if(!isset($_SESSION['start-time'])){
$_SESSION['start_time'] = time();
} 


Then on submit

PHP Code:

$duration = time() - $_SESSION['start_time'];
unset($_SESSION['start_time']); 


In this case the cookie with time value will be quite enough

I see ok... well I'm gonna need a bit of help putting it all together... So what's the first step, get a referral system ready?