The Contact form

Contact forms are (together with comments) a great way to receive feedback. Actually, you have to say THE contact form, there is only one, different contact forms are in fact different categories. Each category determines to whom the form is send, and how the possible autoreply looks like.

It's possible to put the link to the contact-form in one of your menu's (or several). To avoid spam, the form can be monitored with anti-spam modules like Mollom.

Enabling the contact-form

Before you can make and use the contact-form, contact, which is an optional core-module needs to be enabled under Administer>>Site building>>Modules.

setting the permissions

Go to Administer>>User management>>Permissions to set the permissions for the contact-module. Two choices have to be made: who can access, and who can administer the form. Logic says that more people should be able to access the form, then administer.

configure the contact-form

 For the configuration and administration of the contact-form, go to Administer>>Site building>>Contact form. You see 3 tabs on top: List, Add category and Settings.

• The List is probably empty for now, but as soon as you add a category, you will be able to edit or delete it. The category that is selected by default is then shown with 'yes' under Selected.
• Add category: adding a category will add an extra choice on the form. People will have to select a category before they can submit the form. When using only one category, submitters are not bothered with a choice.
  • Category: the name. This is shown in the choice for the submitter.
  • Recipients: Who receives the feedback. It's possible to specify multiple recipients by seperating them with a comma.
  • Auto-reply: A text that can be send after somebody submitted the form.
  • Weight: possibility to higher or lower the category in the category-list
  • Selected: to make the category the one that is standard selected when people open the contact-form.
• The Settings are for all the categories.
  • Additional information: Information to show on the contact form (with this form you can contact me, for example).
  • Hourly treshold: how many times an hour a user can submit the contact-form.
  • Enable personal contact forms by default: if authenticated users can be contacted personally by default.

updating the spam-filter

Since everybody (if enabled) can submit a contact-form, it's good to have a spam-filter like Mollom. If you have one, control the settings for the personal and site-wide contact-form.

adding the link in a menu

Standard, the form is added in the navigation-menu (to be seen by authenticated users), but is dissabled by default. To enable the menu-item, go to Administer>>Site building>>Menus, choose Navigation and enable contact.

To add the form to another menu: choose the menu you want to add it to, choose Add item. The path to the form is contact

Go back to 'Building a Drupal site'