Form validation making field required - forms

Question

I'm a newbie here, I'm working on a registration form and trying to figure out why I can't make the "Name" field be required. Email and everything else seems to work fine. What am I missing?
Thx
this is what I have for the signup.js
$(document).ready(function() {
$("#signup-form").submit(function(e){
e.preventDefault();
var $form = $(this),
name = $form.find('input[name="name"]').val(),
email = $form.find('input[name="email"]').val(),
url = $form.attr('action');
$.post(url, {name:name, email:email},
function(data) {
if(data)
{
if(data=="Some fields are missing.")
{
$("#status").text("Please fill in your name and email.");
$("#status").css("color", "red");
}
else if(data=="Invalid name.")
{
$("#status").text("Please fill in your name.");
$("#status").css("color", "red");
}
else if(data=="Invalid email address.")
{
$("#status").text("Please check your email address.");
$("#status").css("color", "red");
}
else if(data=="Invalid list ID.")
{
$("#status").text("Your list ID is invalid.");
$("#status").css("color", "red");
}
else if(data=="Already subscribed.")
{
$("#status").text("You're already subscribed!");
$("#status").css("color", "red");
}
else
{
$("#status").text("You're subscribed! Please check your email for confirmation.");
$("#status").css("color", "green");
}
}
else
{
alert("Sorry, unable to subscribe. Please try again later!");
}
}
);
});
});
html file has this:
<form action="signup.php" method="POST" accept-charset="utf-8" name="signup-form" id="signup-form" class="sign_form" >
<label for="Silver">Get Notified</label>
<div>
<input type="text" name="name" value="" placeholder="Full Name" class="name" />
<input type="text" name="email" value="" placeholder="Email" class="email" />
<input type="submit" value="➜" id="submit-btn" class="submit" />
</div>
<label id="status"></label>
</form>
and the signup.php file is:
<?php
$submit_url = 'http://www.domain.com/signup';
$list = 'list010101';
//POST variables
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
//subscribe
$postdata = http_build_query(
array(
'name' => $name,
'email' => $email,
'list' => $list,
'boolean' => 'true'
)
);
$opts = array('http' => array('method' => 'POST', 'header' => 'Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded', 'content' => $postdata));
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$result = file_get_contents($submit_url.'/subscribe', false, $context);
echo $result;
?>

Answer 1

I think you should validate before you post because it seems you are posting to the server then checking the values. It's a good idea to validate before you send data to the server.
Something like:
$("#signup-form").submit(function(e){
e.preventDefault();
//use ids to find the form field e.g. <input type='text' id='name'>
var name = $("#name").val();
var email = $("#email").val();
//this is just checking if its an empty string, add your own validation here
if (email == "") return false;
if (name == "") return false;
//return true if validation passes for the form to submit or do your ajax post here
return true;
You could also use this plugin jquery validation