On O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website today, there's a new tutorial posted walking you through the creation of online forms through the amazingly helpful PEAR HTML_QuickForm package.

As its name suggests, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) library called HTML_QuickForm can be used to quickly and cleanly to produce validating HTML forms, relieving the developer of the tedium that often accompanies such tasks. [...] This tutorial presents a basic implementation of HTML_QuickForm to produce a common email contact form and explores ways to get the most from this powerful library.

They introduce the topic by explaining when is a good time to use the package. Now that you're sure you want to use it, they move on to the code portion of the tutorial - the creation of an email form. They define the fields (their labels, types and required status) and show how to dump that array into the HTML_QuickForm class to create the HTML field output. They also add validation rules to check the contents of the field - in this case, ensuring that all of the entries have values and aren't empty.