[Site map] You are here --- > Newbies Paradise > Tutorials > Unofficial > Website > PHP & MySQL > Reading a tutorial

Make a contact form

	Author : En-KenKiller Creation : : on 03/19/2007 01:11:44 PM Last modification: : on 03/12/2008 12:56:35 PM Rate and comment this tutorial Print this tutorial

You are about to read a tutorial written by a member of this website. Although the author probably invested every effort to make this tutorial's content correct, we can not guarantee that the information on this page is 100% exact. Please keep this in mind when reading this tutorial. ;o)

Thanks to this tutorial, you'll be able to create a form which will allow your visitors to contact you without an e-mail software

Chapter Contents :

Building the form
Sending the mail with php
Quiz

Building the form

First we are going to create the form which allow to send the mail. Without it, nothing will be possible

We need four entries :

Visitor's nickname
Visitor's E-mail
The Topic
The message

If you read M@teo21's xhtml tutorial , you should be able to build this form. Try to do it by yourself and after three or four years of hard labour, look at the correction

Spoiler (click to show)

page : contact.php
Code: HTML

<form method="post" action="contact.php">
               
   Nickname:<input type="text" name="nickname" />
   <br/><br/>
 
   Your e-mail: <input type="text" name="visitormail" />
   <br/><br/>
                   
   Topic: <input type="text" name="topic" />
   <br/><br/>
                   
   Message: <br/><textarea name="message" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea>
   <br/><br/>
                   
   <input type="submit" value="Send" />
</form>

No need to explain, it's just a simple form

The form is all right ! So meet you to the second part of this tutorial !

Sending the mail with php

Now we are going to write the php code, that will send the email.
All the explanations are in the code.

page : contact.php
Code: PHP

<?php
//first we check if $_POST['nickname'] ,  $_POST['visitormail'] ,  $_POST['topic'] ,  $_POST['message']  exist, then we check if they are empty or not.
if (!empty($_POST['nickname']) && !empty($_POST['visitormail']) && !empty($_POST['topic']) && !empty($_POST['message']))
{
        //We deactivate possible html tags 
        $nickname = htmlspecialchars($_POST['nickname']);
        $visitormail = htmlspecialchars($_POST['visitormail']);
        $topic = htmlspecialchars($_POST['topic']);
        $message = htmlspecialchars($_POST['message']);
                                                       
        //We transform new lines into <br>s 
        $message = nl2br($message);
                                                   
        //we define the variable:
        //$mail contains the email address of the recipient (admin)
        $mail = 'contact@thing.com';
                                                       
        //$topic is the topic of the message
        $topic = '' . $topic . '';
                                                       
        //Then $mess is the message
        $mess = '<html><body>Message from ' . $pseudo . ' --> ' . $visitormail . '<br/><br/>' . $message . '</body></html>';
                                                       
        //These headers are very important to send html mail using HTML
        $headers  = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n";
        $headers .= 'Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1' . "\r\n";
 
        //Finally we send the mail thanks to the mail() function
        mail($mail, $topic, $mess, $headers);
                                                       
        //and we say to the visitor that the mail has been send
        echo 'Your message has been sent !';
?>

The arguments of the mail() function have to be given in the right order, otherwise it won't work !

There we are !!

Now, you just need to make some improvement as :

The design (Wich is not very nice... )
Allow visitors to choose more than one address

It is something that you should already be able to do, but do not forget to look in the documentation for more information on the mail() function : http://php.net/[Function name].
For mail, it is http://php.net/mail

Author : En-KenKiller
Rate and comment this tutorial
Print this tutorial

How-to

Community

User Menu

Search

Guestbook

Advertising

Make a contact form

Building the form

Sending the mail with php

Quiz