Hi All,

The problem I'm always having with Umbraco is the creation of the contact form for the website.

It's nice and easy I know, with a little user control, but then the client wants to add a field or change the email addresses and you have to mess around editing the contact form ascx and uploading it again.

They are also nearly always the same. Name, email, telephone, blah, blah, blah. But not quite.

So finally I've put together a package to allow you to create a CSS styleable easy to edit (easy for the client), validated contact form.

I've even made a doco to go with it.

Since it has no styling you will need to create the CSS style sheet to match, but I've added in a couple of samples to get you started.

This is now a standard package in all our new website jobs at Essence Design, and hopefully it can be for you too.

Anyway, enough blather. "Where is the code?", I hear you ask.

Well here:
http://www.essence-design.co.uk/download/ED Generic Email Form.zip

And the documentation is here:
http://www.essence-design.co.uk/download/ED Generic Email Form.pdf

Have fun with it. Test it out. Let me have your feedback. We have some future enhancements in mind, but I'd rather hear your feedback.

Sadly I can't post any links to live websites running the code as I don't think our clients would appreciate it and I've not set up a test one that is externally visible.

Anyway, have fun.

Cheers to all

Steven

P.S. Sorry if this appears twice. I blame my dog.

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Web Site Design - Essence Design

Hi,

I didn't look at that at all to be honest. We just programmed sending mail the standard .NET 2.0 way which uses the settings as specified in the notes I wrote.

I'll look into using the Umbraco settings next revision.

Cheers

Steven

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Web Site Design - Essence Design

Hi Doug,

I like AutoForm too, but it is overkill for most of our clients' contact forms who also want to be able to edit the contents of the form, change the recipients etc. This is designed to be as easy as possible for them whilst trying to keep configuration to a maximum.

To answer your questions.

- RegEx support - it has built in support for email validation and telephone number validation. If any other are required they can easily be added by a developer. From the clients perpective they just see a drop down of validation types as per above. I really don't want then having to put in Reg Expressions - it just attracts support calls for no real benefit.

- Support of Captcha is not there. I realised last night that it could be useful, so I'll add it shortly.

- The results of the form are just emailed. It does not make nodes. Part of the "Keep it simple" campaign.

- As for showing a sequence of steps, it is not explicit, but the questions in the form are grouped, and these groups, through CSS and JS, could easily be turned into a wizard style.

- Where to re-direct - it does not re-direct, it shows rich text content for the thank you message. In the content you could easily put a link as to where to go next.

- Button text and button image and alt text are support, as it a form header and footer and email header and footer.

Again, AutoForm will do what you need to do if you want more complex features, but to keep it simple for the clients, and to keep them out of the development area for simple forms this does the job very nicely.

The best thing I could suggest is to create a quick dummy Umbraco (I always keep a blank version backed up for quick testing) and install it and have a play.

Always happy to share as we've gained so much for everyone else.

Cheers to all

Steven

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Web Site Design - Essence Design

Hey Steven mate, the links are dead, could you be so kind as to upload the files again?
Thanks,
Al

Don't forget the <?ASPNET_FORM> tags around the macro in the template.

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• 2007 - 2008 MVP • Charleston, WV, USA • umbracoholic since Dec. 2004 (v.2.0) •
Achieved umbracoholic status on 2008-04-25