So Let's get started tutorial how to build a php ajax contact from with validation and with here is the demo, you can see the demo by the clicking on the showing links blow given, click on the demo link.
Demo
Download
Note: I updated this tutorial to Bootstrap 4 already but no worries if you are still using Bootstrap 3 in your project. Bootstrap 3 version is also part of the download.
HTML template
Let's start with the main HTML layout of our contact form page.There should not be anything tricky for you, so just a few words about it:
- In the
head, we include the Bootstrap stylesheet, Lato from Google fonts, and a localcustom.cssstylesheet. - before the
<body>closing tag we include jQuery, Bootstrap scripts, Bootstrap validator and local contact.js file which will handle AJAX sending of the form - for Bootstrap, jQuery and a Font I used their CDN versions. If you test the scripts without an internet connection, don't forget to include their local versions.
<html>
<head>
<title>Contact Form Tutorial by Saikothouse</title>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.1.3/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-MCw98/SFnGE8fJT3GXwEOngsV7Zt27NXFoaoApmYm81iuXoPkFOJwJ8ERdknLPMO" crossorigin="anonymous">
<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:300,400,700' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
<link href='custom.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-xl-8 offset-xl-2 py-5">
<h1>Contact form Tutorial from <a href="http://saikothouse.blogspot.com">Saikothouse</a></h1>
<p class="lead">This is a demo for our tutorial dedicated to crafting working Bootstrap contact form with PHP and AJAX background.</p>
<p class="lead">This file uses PHPMailer to send the emails.</p>
<form id="contact-form" method="post" action="contact-2.php" role="form">
<div class="messages"></div>
<div class="controls">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-6">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_name">Firstname *</label>
<input id="form_name" type="text" name="name" class="form-control" placeholder="Please enter your firstname *" required="required" data-error="Firstname is required.">
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-md-6">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_lastname">Lastname *</label>
<input id="form_lastname" type="text" name="surname" class="form-control" placeholder="Please enter your lastname *" required="required" data-error="Lastname is required.">
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-6">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_email">Email *</label>
<input id="form_email" type="email" name="email" class="form-control" placeholder="Please enter your email *" required="required" data-error="Valid email is required.">
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-md-6">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_phone">Phone</label>
<input id="form_phone" type="tel" name="phone" class="form-control" placeholder="Please enter your phone">
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-12">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_message">Message *</label>
<textarea id="form_message" name="message" class="form-control" placeholder="Message for me *" rows="4" required="required" data-error="Please, leave us a message."></textarea>
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-md-12">
<input type="submit" class="btn btn-success btn-send" value="Send message">
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-12">
<p class="text-muted"><strong>*</strong> These fields are required. Contact form template by <a href="https://saikothouse.blogspot.com/2020/03/free-bootstrap-contact-form-with-php.html" target="_blank">Saikothouse</a>.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</form>
</div><!-- /.8 -->
</div> <!-- /.row-->
</div> <!-- /.container-->
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js" integrity="sha256-FgpCb/KJQlLNfOu91ta32o/NMZxltwRo8QtmkMRdAu8=" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/popper.js/1.14.3/umd/popper.min.js" integrity="sha384-ZMP7rVo3mIykV+2+9J3UJ46jBk0WLaUAdn689aCwoqbBJiSnjAK/l8WvCWPIPm49" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script src="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.1.3/js/bootstrap.min.js" integrity="sha384-ChfqqxuZUCnJSK3+MXmPNIyE6ZbWh2IMqE241rYiqJxyMiZ6OW/JmZQ5stwEULTy" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/1000hz-bootstrap-validator/0.11.9/validator.min.js" integrity="sha256-dHf/YjH1A4tewEsKUSmNnV05DDbfGN3g7NMq86xgGh8=" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script src="contact-2.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
HTML code of the Contact form
As we have the main layout ready, we can replace the <form></form> in our HTML code with our fancy Bootstrap Contact form itself.At the end form should look like this:
<form id="contact-form" method="post" action="contact.php" role="form">
<div class="messages"></div>
<div class="controls">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-6">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_name">Firstname *</label>
<input id="form_name" type="text" name="name" class="form-control" placeholder="Please enter your firstname *" required="required" data-error="Firstname is required.">
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-md-6">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_lastname">Lastname *</label>
<input id="form_lastname" type="text" name="surname" class="form-control" placeholder="Please enter your lastname *" required="required" data-error="Lastname is required.">
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-6">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_email">Email *</label>
<input id="form_email" type="email" name="email" class="form-control" placeholder="Please enter your email *" required="required" data-error="Valid email is required.">
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-md-6">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_need">Please specify your need *</label>
<select id="form_need" name="need" class="form-control" required="required" data-error="Please specify your need.">
<option value=""></option>
<option value="Request quotation">Request quotation</option>
<option value="Request order status">Request order status</option>
<option value="Request copy of an invoice">Request copy of an invoice</option>
<option value="Other">Other</option>
</select>
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-12">
<div class="form-group">
<label for="form_message">Message *</label>
<textarea id="form_message" name="message" class="form-control" placeholder="Message for me *" rows="4" required="required" data-error="Please, leave us a message."></textarea>
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="col-md-12">
<input type="submit" class="btn btn-success btn-send" value="Send message">
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-12">
<p class="text-muted">
<strong>*</strong> These fields are required. Contact form template by
<a href="https://saikothouse.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Saikothouse</a>.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</form>- We will send the contact form values via
POSTto the PHP script calledcontact.php. As there could be more forms on the page (search etc.), we mark our form with#contact-formid to address it correctly in JavaScript later on. There is also empty div.messagesthat will serve us to display the success or error message after sending the form via AJAX. - Standard Bootstrap forms markup is used - rows, columns, form groups. Form groups are Bootstrap helpers that take care of the appropriate vertical spacing in the form.
- Do not forget to properly assign
labels for the fields using theirforattribute. This should contain the id of the form element it refers to. - For the validation of the fields, we will be using the great Bootsrap Validation Validation rules are specified on form inputs via the standard HTML5 attributes, in our case these are
requiredandtype="email". - We will be using custom error messages for each field, passed to the script in the
data-errorattribute. - To display the possible errors, there is a
<div class="help-block with-errors"></div>block added to eachform-group - Also, note
type="email"andtype="tel"inputs that will enhance the user experience, especially for users using a mobile device.
This should basically do for the HTML part of the form and we can move on to the PHP script.
Do not forget to download and include the Bootstrap validator JavaScript files if you are writing the code yourself and not using the CDN version Bootstrap validator Download them from here.
PHP script
The PHP script that will handle the email sending is located in thecontact.php file.In the first part of the script, we configure basic variables we will need. These are:
$from- the email address that will be in the From field of the email. Important: To avoid being marked as spam or even to be able to send it from your web host, use an existing email on your domain. If you will be using the form on mygreatsite.com, use'info@mygreatsite.com'in this variable.$sendTo- the email address that will receive the email with the output of the form. Can be your personal address or can be same as the address as in$fromvariable. Make sure this email exists.$subject- the subject of the email$fields- an array of form control names and their English counterparts. If we have input called name<input name="name">, we can call it in our email e.g. Customer Name like this: 'name' => 'Customer Name'$okMessage- the message text displayed on the web page when the message is successfully sent$errorMessage- the text of the message displayed in case of an error
try/catch block which will catch all the possible errors.The code that prepares and sends the email based on the form values works as follows:
- if the POST array where the form values are stored is not empty, continue. Otherwise, if
(count($_POST) == 0), throw an error message - Then, we start building the email message content in
$emailTextvariable. - We iterate through the
$_POST( the array containing all the values sent through the POST request). - If we find out that the key of the item from
$_POSTarray also exists in our$fieldsarray, we include it to the text of the message in$emailText. - We send the email via PHP internal
mail()function. We add some important headers to the email using the$headersarray (encoding, from header, reply to, etc.) - We create
$responseArrayvariable to be sent as a JSON response back to ourindex.html. The$responseArraywill be handled by our JavaScript function and displayed as a Bootstrap alert box. - If the request came via AJAX (you check this in PHP using the condition
if(!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) == 'xmlhttprequest')) , we send the JSON response. If not, we simply display the message (this should be a rare case - e.g. for users with disabled JavaSript)
<?php
/*
* CONFIGURE EVERYTHING HERE
*/
// an email address that will be in the From field of the email.
$from = 'Demo contact form <demo@domain.com>';
// an email address that will receive the email with the output of the form
$sendTo = 'Demo contact form <demo@domain.com>';
// subject of the email
$subject = 'New message from contact form';
// form field names and their translations.
// array variable name => Text to appear in the email
$fields = array('name' => 'Name', 'surname' => 'Surname', 'phone' => 'Phone', 'email' => 'Email', 'message' => 'Message');
// message that will be displayed when everything is OK :)
$okMessage = 'Contact form successfully submitted. Thank you, I will get back to you soon!';
// If something goes wrong, we will display this message.
$errorMessage = 'There was an error while submitting the form. Please try again later';
/*
* LET'S DO THE SENDING
*/
// if you are not debugging and don't need error reporting, turn this off by error_reporting(0);
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);
try
{
if(count($_POST) == 0) throw new \Exception('Form is empty');
$emailText = "You have a new message from your contact form\n=============================\n";
foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) {
// If the field exists in the $fields array, include it in the email
if (isset($fields[$key])) {
$emailText .= "$fields[$key]: $value\n";
}
}
// All the neccessary headers for the email.
$headers = array('Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8";',
'From: ' . $from,
'Reply-To: ' . $from,
'Return-Path: ' . $from,
);
// Send email
mail($sendTo, $subject, $emailText, implode("\n", $headers));
$responseArray = array('type' => 'success', 'message' => $okMessage);
}
catch (\Exception $e)
{
$responseArray = array('type' => 'danger', 'message' => $errorMessage);
}
// if requested by AJAX request return JSON response
if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) == 'xmlhttprequest') {
$encoded = json_encode($responseArray);
header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo $encoded;
}
// else just display the message
else {
echo $responseArray['message'];
}
Technical requirements for the PHP are:
- PHP >= 5.3
- email server setup
Local testing and usage: If you are testing the contact form on your computer, the PHP script and whole process should work but you will not receive the email to your inbox. To be able to receive the emails, you will need to upload the script to your webhost.
A little bit of JavaScript
The JavaScript part of this tutorial will handle the validation of the form and its sending via AJAX. We will save it tocontact.js.First, we will run the validator script on our contact form.
Then, we will add some JavaScript that will help us with the submitting of the form via AJAX request.
It works like this:
- When the form with the
#contact-formid is submitted, we make the POST request to thecontact.phpscript. - On request's success, we work with the JSON object that is returned by the PHP script. The object has only two properties - type and message
- We use type and message to construct the message visible for the user - in case of error we display
alert-danger, in case of success we displayalert-success - We display the message, reset form inputs and
return false;to prevent the usual form submitting
$(function () {
// init the validator
// validator files are included in the download package
// otherwise download from http://1000hz.github.io/bootstrap-validator
$('#contact-form').validator();
// when the form is submitted
$('#contact-form').on('submit', function (e) {
// if the validator does not prevent form submit
if (!e.isDefaultPrevented()) {
var url = "contact.php";
// POST values in the background the the script URL
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: url,
data: $(this).serialize(),
success: function (data)
{
// data = JSON object that contact.php returns
// we recieve the type of the message: success x danger and apply it to the
var messageAlert = 'alert-' + data.type;
var messageText = data.message;
// let's compose Bootstrap alert box HTML
var alertBox = '<div class="alert ' + messageAlert + ' alert-dismissable"><button type="button" class="close" data-dismiss="alert" aria-hidden="true">×</button>' + messageText + '</div>';
// If we have messageAlert and messageText
if (messageAlert && messageText) {
// inject the alert to .messages div in our form
$('#contact-form').find('.messages').html(alertBox);
// empty the form
$('#contact-form')[0].reset();
}
}
});
return false;
}
})
});Wrapping Up
So, that's all for today. You should have a great contact form working and ready to be implemented on your website.Update 5/5/2017: Further modifications of our Bootstrap contact form
This article is one of the most read articles on Bootstrapious and has helped, based on your feedback, a lot of people so far.I usually update my articles with small fixes only but I decided to give this one a bit of a special care. Today, I would like to show you some more modifications that can take the functionalities of the form a bit further. Many of them are based on your comments or questions. I hope you will find it useful.
PHPMailer
In the following upgrades (#1 and #2), we will replace the standard and basic PHPmail() function by a complex email-sending library PHPMailerThere is a PHPMailer package included in the download but I suggest that you download the actual release from its PHPMailer. (This article uses PHPMailer 5, if you would be using the latest PHPMailer 6, some code changes might be necessary).
Apart from including PHPMailer autoload file, we will need to make few changes to our configuration part of the PHP script.
<?php
/*
THIS FILE USES PHPMAILER INSTEAD OF THE PHP MAIL() FUNCTION
*/
require 'PHPMailer-master/PHPMailerAutoload.php';
/*
* CONFIGURE EVERYTHING HERE
*/
// an email address that will be in the From field of the email.
$fromEmail = 'demo@domain.com';
$fromName = 'Demo contact form';
// an email address that will receive the email with the output of the form
$sendToEmail = 'demo@domain.com';
$sendToName = 'Demo contact form';
// subject of the email
$subject = 'New message from contact form';
// form field names and their translations.
// array variable name => Text to appear in the email
$fields = array('name' => 'Name', 'surname' => 'Surname', 'phone' => 'Phone', 'email' => 'Email', 'message' => 'Message');
// message that will be displayed when everything is OK :)
$okMessage = 'Contact form successfully submitted. Thank you, I will get back to you soon!';
// If something goes wrong, we will display this message.
$errorMessage = 'There was an error while submitting the form. Please try again later';$from and $sendTo variables by a pair of values $fromName and $fromEmail. The reason is that we will have to pass name and email separately to the PHPMailer.Now, we have everything ready for a first tweak of our form.
Tweak #1 Sending HTML emails
You can send HTML emails with themail() function too but it is not ideal solution as you cannot easily create a plain-text part of the message. We are going to use the PHPMailer instead.First, we will compose the HTML email body.
Basically, it is done the same way as in the plain-text version. We only add few more tags like a heading, paragraph with a signature and we will output the form variables into a
<table> element.$emailTextHtml = "<h1>You have a new message from your contact form</h1><hr>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<table>";
foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) {
// If the field exists in the $fields array, include it in the email
if (isset($fields[$key])) {
$emailTextHtml .= "<tr><th>$fields[$key]</th><td>$value</td></tr>";
}
}
$emailTextHtml .= "</table><hr>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<p>Have a nice day,<br>Best,<br>Ondrej</p>";We will set the from address for the email
$mail->setFrom() and a recepient of the email by $mail->addAddress() too.Both functions accept two parameters. First one is an email address (obligatory parameter) and the second one is a name of the sender/recepient (optional).
$mail = new PHPMailer;
$mail->setFrom($fromEmail, $fromName);
$mail->addAddress($sendToEmail, $sendToName); // you can add more addresses by simply adding another line with $mail->addAddress();
$mail->addReplyTo($from); $mail->isHTML(true);. After that, we just need to pass the $emailText we have pregenerated to a $mail->msgHTML() function. This function will automatically create a plain-text version of the email too. Perfect, right?$mail->isHTML(true);
$mail->Subject = $subject;
$mail->msgHTML($emailTextHtml); // this will also create a plain-text version of the HTML email, very handy$mail->send(). We also monitor its output and when it returns FALSE (!$mail->send()), we throw an exception.if(!$mail->send()) {
throw new \Exception('I could not send the email.' . $mail->ErrorInfo);
}contact-2.php.Tweak #2 Sending emails via SMTP
I usually send emails from the same server but there can be situations when you would prefer the email to be sent from a different email server (your own email account, your another domain or your gmail). In this part, I will show you how to send it easily.We will be using PHPMailer again.
First, we will add a new section to the configuration part of contact.php. There will be 3 new variables:
$smtpHost(usually something line smtp.yourdomain.com; for gmail it is smtp.gmail.com)$smtpUsername(usually your email)$smtpPassword(usually your email password).
// smtp credentials and server
$smtpHost = 'smtp.domain.com';
$smtpUsername = 'hello@domain.com';
$smtpPassword = 'PASSWORD';$mail = new PHPMailer;
... - set from, recipient, message...
$mail->isSMTP();
//Enable SMTP debugging
// 0 = off (for production use)
// 1 = client messages
// 2 = client and server messages
$mail->SMTPDebug = 0;
$mail->Debugoutput = 'html';
//Set the hostname of the mail server
// use
// $mail->Host = gethostbyname('smtp.gmail.com');
// if your network does not support SMTP over IPv6
$mail->Host = gethostbyname($smtpHost);
//Set the SMTP port number - 587 for authenticated TLS, a.k.a. RFC4409 SMTP submission
$mail->Port = 587;
//Set the encryption system to use - ssl (deprecated) or tls
$mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';
//Whether to use SMTP authentication
$mail->SMTPAuth = true;
//Username to use for SMTP authentication - use full email address for gmail
//We have configured this variable in the config section
$mail->Username = $smtpHost;
//Password to use for SMTP authentication
//We have configured this variable in the config section
$mail->Password = $smtpPassword;
if(!$mail->send()) {
throw new \Exception('I could not send the email.' . $mail->ErrorInfo);
}This tweak is also included in the download package as
contact-3.php.Tweak #3 A bunch of smaller tweaks, actually
3.1. Adding more recepients
If you are usingmail() PHP function: Just duplicate the row with mail() function and add a new email address.mail($sendTo, $subject, $emailText, implode("\n", $headers));
mail('new@emailaddress.com', $subject, $emailText, implode("\n", $headers));$mail->addToAdress() more times:$mail->addAddress($sendToEmail, $sendToName);
$mail->addAddress('newemail@domain.com', 'Johnny');3.2. Composing your own email message
I am using the iteration through$_POST to compose the email message to simplify things a bit. But it is not a problem to compose your own message easily.Plain Text message
Replace this code snippet
$emailText = "You have a new message from your contact form\n=============================\n";
foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) {
// If the field exists in the $fields array, include it in the email
if (isset($fields[$key])) {
$emailText .= "$fields[$key]: $value\n";
}
}$emailText = "You have a new message from your contact form\n
=============================\n
Some more text\n
Name: $_POST[name]\n
Message: $_POST[message]\n
Add more form fields or custom text....";$_POST array and also that you need to use \n for new lines.HTML Message
If you are using the HTML message with the PHPMailer, the solution would be replacing this:
$emailTextHtml = "<h1>You have a new message from your contact form</h1><hr>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<table>";
foreach ($_POST as $key => $value) {
// If the field exists in the $fields array, include it in the email
if (isset($fields[$key])) {
$emailTextHtml .= "<tr><th>$fields[$key]</th><td>$value</td></tr>";
}
}
$emailTextHtml .= "</table><hr>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<p>Have a nice day,<br>Best,<br>Ondrej</p>";$emailTextHtml = "<style type='text/css'>body {font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; }</style>"
$emailTextHtml .= "<body>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<h1>You have a new message from your contact form</h1><hr>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<table>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<tr><th>Some custom message</th><td>$_POST[name]</td>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<tr><th>Some custom stuff</th><td>$_POST[surname]</td>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<tr><th>...</th><td>....</td>";
$emailTextHtml .= "</table>";
$emailTextHtml .= "<p>Have a nice day,<br>Best,<br>Ondrej</p>";
$emailTextHtml .= "</body>";3.3 Redirect user to a different page, do not use AJAX
Maybe you will not need the AJAX form submit in the background but you would welcome a possibility to redirect the user to a different page. This is a often forgotten best practise, to redirect after the form is submitted.We all know annoying browser questions that you are about to send a form data again, etc., that happen if you do not redirect the user after submitting a form.
Also like this, you eliminate the possibility to receive the form more than once.
The solution to this would be following:
1. Remove following snippet from contact.js.
// when the form is submitted
// delete ALL OF THESE
$('#contact-form').on('submit', function (e) {
....
})// if requested by AJAX request return JSON response
if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) == 'xmlhttprequest') {
...
}
// else just display the message
else {
...
}if ($responseArray['type'] == 'success') {
// success redirect
header('Location: http://www.example.com/success.html');
}
else {
//error redirect
header('Location: http://www.example.com/error.html');
}Wrapping Up #2
This is really it. I hope you have learned something new today and this tutorial has helped you on your web design journey.Thanks for reading.
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