Setting Up A Contact Form in Drupal 5

When I set up a Drupal site, one of the first things I do is add a contact form. This contact form allows people reading the site an avenue to contact the webmaster, sales department, accounting, etc. It's actually easy to set up once you see the whole process in its entirety.

What's really cool about the contact form is that you can set up multiple categories, and each category can go to a separate email address (or even multiple email addresses). The other nice benefit of this form, which I did not mention in the video, is that it hides the email addresses so spammers can't scrape your site for email addresses.

The first thing you need to do is turn on the Contact module. This module is part of the Drupal core modules, but it is an optional one and it is turned off by default.

Once it is turned on you will see a new menu item under Site Building called Contact form. This is where you set everything up. You basically have three tabs: List, Add category, and Settings.

The Add category is where you add the different departments and their respective emal addresses. In the video, I added Website Feedback and Suggestions. You can add as many categories as you want and on the actual contact form, the viewer will select the proper category they want to contact using Drupal.

There are also a couple of other options here. you can weight the categories so they can list in a certain order on the drop down list, and you can set up a category to be selected by default

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The final tab, Settings, is where the global settings are for the contact form. You can add more text describing what the contact form is from here.

After setting this up, you need to go to the Menu section under Site building in the navigation menu. By default Drupal added a Contact menu item, but it is disabled by default. So you may have all the categories set up, but no one can get to them yet as their is no menu item to select. So you need to enable it.

Now everything looks good and it is all working until you log out. The final step is you need to give access priviledges by going to Drupal's Access control menu under User management. From here you can set it up to where only authenticated users can use it, and/or you can set it up to where anonymous users can use it.

So there you go, contact forms in Drupal simplified... Drupal rocks!