Using Joomla!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Creating Forms

Forms are very common on websites. Contact forms are the most popular. Often there is a need for highly customized forms in order to get the information you need from visitors.

In this chapter, we will add a contact form and a donation form with fields to accept payments via PayPal. This will give you a brief idea of what is possible for your website.

Contact Form with Contact Enhanced

Contacts and contact forms are included with Joomla when it installs. The contact form isn’t particularly flexible and doesn’t always look very pretty. Thus, we are going to use a third-party extension for the Joomla Pet Center contact page/form.

Contact Enhanced is one of many extensions available from Ideal Extensions. Contact Enhanced is a commercial extension and worth every penny for the increased flexibility and ability to customize your contact page by adding extra contact detail fields—and to customize your contact form by adding form fields. With Contact Enhanced, you can put a contact form into a module position, which is helpful on many sites where you may not want the form to take an entire page. The support for Contact Enhanced is fantastic.

Note

The following exercises are not a substitute for the developer’s documentation. It is recommended that you read the developer’s documentation as well.

For Joomla Pet Center, we are going to keep the contact form pretty basic. We will add a field in the form to collect the specific topic that the visitor is contacting us about. ...