Creating a Contact Form in Joomla
Posted on 23. Sep, 2008 by admin in Joomla Tutorials.
In order to create a contact form in Joomla you need to create a category for your contact to be added to, you need to then create the contact and connect this contact to a registered user of the site and you need to create a link to your contact component so that there is a way to get to the contact form from the front page of the site. This tutorial will walk you through these steps.
First select Components from the menu and then move down toward Contacts and open categories from the fly out menu. This will open the Category Manager:[Contact Details] screen. This contains a list of categories for your contacts. For example if you had an online store with a department that sold CD’s and a department that sold DVD’s you could have a category for contacts relating to each department and maybe a contact for accounts for people who are having trouble using the shopping cart in the online store. Click the New button on the top right of the screen.
This takes you to the Category:[New] screen. Enter a Title for your Category and a Description if you want to. I have entered Technical Support as my title.
Click the save button on the top right of the screen. This takes you back to the Category Manager:[Contact Details] screen. This category has nothing to do with the categories related to content of the site, it is used only for Contacts.
Go back to the top menu select components again, but this time instead of selecting Categories from the contacts fly out menu select contacts. This will take you to the Contact Manager screen. Click the New button on the top right of the screen, this takes you to the Contact:[New] Screen.
In this screen we need to fill out some details of our contact. In the Details section, enter the name for your contact in the Name field, select a category for your contact from the Category dropdown list and select a user to link this contact to from the user dropdown list. This will mean that the email address that is recorded for that user, will receive the emails from the contact form.
Click Save on the top right of the screen, this will take you back to the Contact Manager screen. You have created a contact component now, for this contact and linked it to the user’s email address, however there is no way for a visitor to get to the contact form from the front page of your site, so the next step is to create a link in our menu to the contact component.
Go to the Administration Menu and Select Menu and then Main Menu, this will take you to the Menu Item Manager : [mainmenu] Screen. Click the New Icon on the top right of the screen. This takes us to the Menu Item: [New] Screen
From the List of Menu Items that you can create there are 2 options for Contacts, one will list contacts for an entire category and the other will display a single contact’s details. Click on Standard Contact Layout in the list. This will bring up a form to fill out details, enter a title for the Menu item in the Details section of the screen, I entered Contact Technical Support, this will be the words that appear on the link which a visitor will click from the menu. On the right side of the screen under parameters basic you will need to select the contact that you created in the earlier step from the Select Contact dropdown list if this is the first time you are doing this, it should be selected automatically as there will only be one contact.
Click the Save button on the top right of the screen. To see what the contact link you have created click Preview in the top right of the menu (the one that is just below the green bar at the top of the administration panel). This will open up your Joomla site to the front page; you will now see a new link in your menu named what you named it in the previous step. Click on the menu link you created and you will be taken to the new contact form that you created.
