I have dealt with this question before. MySQL has a very flimsy architecture when it comes to triggers.
I have written posts before on how to break triggers midstream. The solution is rather unsavory and would leave a pure SQL developer with a bad taste in the month.
With that said, here are my posts that I hope would help:
Since you are a newbie, writing trigger code requires changing the delimiter to something other than a semicolon and then changing back.
DELIMITER $$
CREATE TRIGGER chk_dates
BEFORE INSERT ON verlof_aanvragen
FOR EACH ROW
BEGIN
IF (NEW.datum < CURDATE() + INTERVAL 8 DAY OR NEW.datum > CURDATE() + INTERVAL 365 DAY)
THEN
SIGNAL SQLSTATE '45000' SET MESSAGE_TEXT = 'Any Message';
END IF;
END $$
DELIMITER ;
Please look back at my posts to see how I do this in my code.
UPDATE 2013-06-12 11:34 EDT
Here is your last comment
I am using above trigger with mysql server v 5.5.24 and it works fine.
This is my local test site. Now I want to use it at my webhost, they
have mysql server v 5.1.56 ... and it won; t work ! Am I missing
something?
The problem is the MySQL version. If you look back in my two trigger posts, I used black market techniques to break the trigger midstream. This is necessary for older versions of MySQL. Notice what I stated on Apr 25, 2011 in Trigger in MySQL to prevent insertion :
The reason the book suggests preempting the Trigger in this manner
stems from the fact that the MySQL Stored Procedure Language did not
have SIGNAL implemented into the language (of course, SIGNAL is ANSI
standard).
The authors of the book created work arounds by calling on SQL
statements that are syntactically correct but fail at runtime. Pages
144-145 (Chapter 6: Error Handling) of the book gives these examples
on preempting a Stored Procedure directly (Example 6-18) or by SIGNAL
emulation (Examples 6-19 and 6-20).
I directly quoted Pages 254-256 of the Book

Please note the following:
Therefore, signal processing DOES NOT WORK IN MySQL 5.1.
You will have to do the following:
- Rewrite the trigger in MySQL 5.1 to break midstream
- The trigger you wrote in the MySQL 5.5 database should stay the way it is now
That's why the trigger does not work in MySQL 5.1.
UPDATE 2013-06-12 11:44 EDT
Here is what you can do to the trigger in the MySQL 5.1.56 database
DELIMITER $$
CREATE TRIGGER chk_dates
BEFORE INSERT ON verlof_aanvragen
FOR EACH ROW
BEGIN
DECLARE dummy INT;
IF (NEW.datum < CURDATE() + INTERVAL 8 DAY OR NEW.datum > CURDATE() + INTERVAL 365 DAY)
THEN
SELECT 'Any Message' INTO dummy FROM mysql.user WHERE used = 'anything';
END IF;
END $$
DELIMITER ;
Since mysql.user has no column called used, the query does not execute, breaking the trigger.