PHP

Contact forms are a great way to enable visitors to your site to contact you. In this tutorial, I will explain how to create a contact form using HTML and PHP. While PHP is not the easiest language to learn, it is easily customizable and can be easily extended to work with various technologies such as mySQL and Flash!

11/11/11 Update
A more recent version of this tutorial can be found here: Creating an E-Mail Contact Form

Let's start with a very basic contact form for now. Our contact form will span two pages. One page will actually contain the HTML form, and the other page will contain the PHP code that receives the data from the HTML form and e-mails it to your mailbox:

This tutorial is in several parts. The first part will simply provide the code for recreating a contact form. You will copy and paste some code I provide for both the HTML page and the PHP page. In the second part of the tutorial, I explain why the code works. In the third part of the tutorial, I expand upon what you created by introducing more form elements such as checkboxes, option buttons, and drop-down menus!

The HTML Page
First, let us create the HTML page that simply contains the contact form. Create a new page called contact.htm. On that page, we will be add our contact form. Our form is very simple. It simply contains two text fields and and one text area.

Here is how our final form would look - not very pretty, I know:

But, let's start with a very basic form and build our way up to having something more complicated such as what you see above. The following is a lite version of the form:

<form method="POST" action="mailer.php">
   <input type="text" name="name" size="19"><br>
   <br>
   <input type="text" name="email" size="19"><br>
   <br>
   <textarea rows="9" name="message" cols="30"></textarea>
   <br>
   <br>
   <input type="submit" value="Submit" name="submit">
</form>

Note the code that is colored in blue. The blue colored words will be useful for us in the next page where we write the PHP code.

Onwards to the next page!

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