What is a Mail form?

A mail Form is exactly what it sounds like.

It is a form that your users fill out that will generate an email sent to you.

Some example uses of mail forms are:

• Contact forms,
• Surveys,
• Questionnaires,
• A feedback form

Mail Forms have two parts:

• HTML: This is what your users see and is usually part of another page. this is where your form is built and such things as text boxes, buttons and the like are shown.
• PHP: this is a server-side script which handles the error checking and the sending of the email.

Sunrise Waterfall will handle making both of these for you with no coding required.

Some things to be aware of:

1. You can not test a contact form on your local machine. This is because PHP is designed to be run on a server and while there are windows based solutions for this, the setup can be a little bit complicated and is beyond this document at the current time.

2. When running this on a server, the server must have support for:

*php,

*the mail function of php.

Most servers do have this enabled by default but if you are unsure, ask your service provider.

What elements can I add to my form?

The following is a list of the elements and what they are for the contact form.

• Dropdown list: This is a box from which people can select an item from a list of options.
• Multiline text area: This is a text box that allows multiple lines of input.
• Checkbox: A clickable item which can either be clicked, or not.
• date field: This allows the user to pick a date of the form day, month, year.
• Email field: This is a text box designed for email addresses and on smartphones will ensure they have the @ sign and sometimes "." and ".com" easily available.
• number field: This adds a text box which allows the user to type or choose a number.
• Radio boxes: Like a cross between check box and dropdown lists, radio boxes allow the user to pick a single option from a list of pre-defined ones.
• text field: just a standard text box.
• reset button: this resets all the fields of the form.
• Submit: This is a required element and allows the user to submit their form.
• Other: You can also add headings, line breaks and plain text elements to your form for explanations or formatting.

Editing the layout:

From the first screen you have entered, that which shows a list of form elements, an add button and a save button you can edit the form.

You can:

1. Press delete to delete an element.

2. Press alt and up arrow to shift an element up.

3. Press alt and down arrow to shift an element down.

Saving:

When you click save Sunrise Waterfall will ask you to fill out a couple of questions:

1. Your email address. This should be the address you want the results sent to.

2. The email that the form should come from. This is usually something like noreply@yourdomain.com.

3. A success message. This is the message that will be displayed to your user when they have filled out the form correctly and it has been sent. you can put HTML code in this if you wish.

The PHP code.

The PHP code will be put into a file that has a number followed by .php, for instance:

"123456.php"

You can view these in a simple text editor like notepad.

I have done my best to add comments to the PHP script so that you can understand what it does.

I hope it helps.

Built with thanks using Sunrise Waterfall by Nathan Tech.