Free, simple, PHP based email contact form

This page presents the sample code for a simple 'contact us' form. The form collects a few pieces of information ( email, name and a message ) from your visitor and emails it to you.

Note: You can make contact forms quickly with Simfatic Forms. Simfatic Forms helps you to make complete, feature rich forms and get it online quickly. Read more here.

Why to have a contact form?

"Contact us" forms are essential for almost any website. The 'contact us' form provides an easy interface through which your visitors can communicate to you. Your visitors can quickly submit their views, opinions and suggestions about your website , product or service.

The HTML contact form code

We will create a simple contact form with 3 fields: name, email address and a message field. Making the contact form simple (any form – for that matter) gets you more submissions. The more the number of fields, the more reluctant your visitors will be to submit the form.

The HTML code of the form is given below:

<form method="post" name="contact_form"
action="contact-form-handler.php">
    Your Name:
    <input type="text" name="name">
    Email Address:
    <input type="text" name="email">
    Message:
    <textarea name="message"></textarea>
    <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

In the contact form download, the form code is in the email-contact-form.html page. To embed the form in a web page, just copy and paste the HTML form code to the web page.

Validating the form submission

Form validations are essential for any web form. For this simple contact form, we will make all the fields mandatory and will make sure that the email field is in the format: name@domain.tld.

It is better to do validations both on the client side and on the server side. Client side validation provides a quick feedback to your visitor. However, the client side validation can just be bypassed by disabling JavaScript in the browser. Therefore, we need to validate on the server side as well.

For client side validation, we will use the Free JavaScript Form Validation Script. The script is very simple to use and has almost all validation types built-in.

Here is the client side form validation code:

<script language="JavaScript">
var frmvalidator  = new Validator("contactform");
frmvalidator.addValidation("name","req","Please provide your name");
frmvalidator.addValidation("email","req","Please provide your email");
frmvalidator.addValidation("email","email",
  "Please enter a valid email address");
</script>

Server-side processing

Once the contact form is submitted, the form submission data is sent to the script mentioned in the action attribute of the form (contact-form-handler.php in our form). The script then will collect the form submission data, validate it and send the email.

The first step is to validate the data. Ensure that the mandatory fields are filled-in, and that the email is in proper format.

The server-side code is given below:

$errors = '';
$myemail = 'yourname@website.com';//<-----Put Your email address here.
if(empty($_POST['name'])  ||
   empty($_POST['email']) ||
   empty($_POST['message']))
{
    $errors .= "\n Error: all fields are required";
}
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email_address = $_POST['email'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
if (!preg_match(
"/^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$/i",
$email_address))
{
    $errors .= "\n Error: Invalid email address";
}

Emailing the form data using PHP

We will now compose and send the email.

if( empty($errors))
{
$to = $myemail;
$email_subject = "Contact form submission: $name";
$email_body = "You have received a new message. ".
" Here are the details:\n Name: $name \n ".
"Email: $email_address\n Message \n $message";
$headers = "From: $myemail\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: $email_address";
mail($to,$email_subject,$email_body,$headers);
//redirect to the 'thank you' page
header('Location: contact-form-thank-you.html');
}

We first check whether the validations succeeded. If there were errors, the email is not sent. The PHP mail function is used to send the email. After sending the email, the visitor is redirected to the 'thank you' page.

Download the code for the contact form

Click here to download php-email-contact-form.zip

The download contains the code for the HTML form, the validations and the PHP form handler.

More Contact forms:

• A simple, easy PHP contact form
• A popup contact form
• A contact form with file upload support

Related posts:

1. How to create PHP based email form with file attachment

Tagged as: free php email form, php email contact form