This tutorial will teach you how to create a very simple contact form for HTML based website template.

HTML

First of all create 2 files: contact_form.html and contact.php. The first file will contain HTML code for the form and the second -will process the data from the form

<form action="contact.php" method="post">    Your name    <input type="text" name="cf_name">    Your e-mail    <input type="text" name="cf_email">    Message    <textarea name="cf_message">    <input type="submit" value="Send">    <input type="reset" value="Clear"></form> 

And this is how it will look in the browser

PHP

Let’s have a quick look at some main aspects of it. The

tag should have 2 additional attributes:

action=”contact.php” – this attribute specifies where to send the data from the contact form fields, when it has been submitted

method=”post” – this attribute specifies how to send data from the form to the file specified in the action attribute

$field_name = $_POST['cf_name'];
$field_email = $_POST['cf_email'];
$field_message = $_POST['cf_message'];

$mail_to shall contain the site owner email, this is where the email is sent to. You can specify multiple emails by separating them with a comma (e.g. mail-one@template-help.com, mail-two@template-help.com)

$mail_to = 'test@test-mail.com';

Subject of the email you receive from the contact form

$subject = 'Message from a site visitor ' . $field_name;

Constructing the body of the message

$body_message = 'From: '.$field_name."\n";$body_message .= 'E-mail: '.$field_email."\n";$body_message .= 'Message: '.$field_message;

Constructing the headers of the message

$headers = "From: $cf_email\r\n";$headers .= "Reply-To: $cf_email\r\n";

Defining mail() function and assigning it to a variable $mail_status, which is used below to check whether the mail has been sent or not

$mail_status = mail($mail_to, $subject, $body_message, $headers);

If the mail() function executed successfully then do the code below

if ($mail_status) { ?>    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">        // Print a message        alert('Thank you for the message. We will contact you shortly.');        // Redirect to some page of the site. You can also specify full URL, e.g. http://template-help.com        window.location = 'contact_page.html';    </script><?php}

If the mail() function fails, then execute the following code

else { ?>    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">        // Print a message        alert('Message failed. Please, send an email to gordon@template-help.com');        // Redirect to some page of the site. You can also specify full URL, e.g. http://template-help.com        window.location = 'contact_page.html';    </script><?php}?>