Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of contactForm – a plugin for lucidCMS that generates a contact form in any page which you desire. The requirements are minimal – typically any system that has lucidCMS running should be able to use my plugin as well.
I have heard of cases where the server admins have disabled the PHP mail() function (recently written about by the infamous Double Helix over at www.getoffthecomputer.com and that will definitely cause my plugin not to work. Future versions may use the SMTP function of PHP to send the message, but don’t hold your breath.
Thanks to zachofalltrades for his assistance in helping me to get the plugin registering and working properly and to Brandon as well for error checking. Please feel free to use the comments of this post as a support forum of sorts if you feel so led.
That being said, download contactForm 1.0 from the Necessary Hosting servers.
It’s time like this that make my heart flutter with happiness.
Thanks for covering stuff about lucidCMS — I discovered it, having been a pages/whisper user, via your site.
That said, I’m taking a look at your plugin and making some tweaks…
* Nicer subject line and from address (checks whether they added an email address, if yes, then that’s the from, otherwise it’s the same as the to.)
* Some error checking, will probably start with correctly formatted email address (I have a gnarly chunk of regexp sitting around that I can use for that), but it’ll need to have a way to feed back the error if any.
* Maybe take a look at a different way of displaying the thanks…I’m a big fan of forms that loop back to the same page and then display a thank you message in context. But I’ll definitely have to grok the plugin/api structure a little better before I really go at it.
Do you want me to keep you apprised?
One thing that you could do with this…
Have the contact form place the messages into the archive table in the database, and then send a notification to a designated user. You could even have the contact form display a dropdown list of lucid usernames, and file the message in the archive appropriately…
Justin:
Excited about the plug in, but I have come across a problem. I have (for arcane technical reasons) installed and uninstalled the plug-in a couple of times to try to get it to work. My problem is that each time I install the plug-in, it adds the ‘Redirect Page’and ‘Send to e mail’ config. fields to the Config page: after a couple of install/uninstall cycles I now have three ‘Send to e mail’ fields and three ‘Redirect page’ fields.
A bug?
Unfortunately I am unable to get the contact form plugin to display on a page. I am obviously doing something wrong but the documentation is very little. Any hints?
Thank you.
Unfortunately, lucidCMS has undergone serious changes since the release of my plugin. I no longer use lucidCMS – so therefore I’ve not updated the code to work with any newwer versions.