Regardless of which kind of site you manage or own, you likely require a contact form. The contact form can aid your visitors to ask a quotation, request advice, or share some strategies or problems they are facing while using your site.

Within this tutorial, our focus will be on developing a fully operational contact type from PHP from start to finish. We’ll start with the markup of all of the fields that we will need to add along with the simple styling of this contact type. Following that, we’ll proceed into the PHP code to execute its performance.

PHP (a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be easily embedded into HTML.

The good thing about PHP is that your form will look like exactly the same as an HTML5 form. You just need to know basic PHP code to start implementing it on your website forms.

How to make a proper HTML5 form?

Just how many fields you increase the contact form is based upon the kind of site you run, but ensure that you don’t overdo it. Forcing people to fill out a lot of details may dissuade them from filling it.

<form action="contact.php" method="post">
<div class="elem-group">
<label for="name">Your Name</label>
<input type="text" id="name" name="visitor_name" placeholder="John Doe" pattern=[A-Z\sa-z]{3,20} required>
</div>
<div class="elem-group">
<label for="email">Your E-mail</label>
<input type="email" id="email" name="visitor_email" placeholder="john.doe@email.com" required>
</div>
<div class="elem-group">
<label for="department-selection">Choose Concerned Department</label>
<select id="department-selection" name="concerned_department" required>
<option value="">Select a Department</option>
<option value="billing">Billing</option>
<option value="marketing">Marketing</option>
<option value="technical support">Technical Support</option>
</select>
</div>
<div class="elem-group">
<label for="title">Reason For Contacting Us</label>
<input type="text" id="title" name="email_title" required placeholder="Unable to Reset my Password" pattern=[A-Za-z0-9\s]{8,60}>
</div>
<div class="elem-group">
<label for="message">Write your message</label>
<textarea id="message" name="visitor_message" placeholder="Say whatever you want." required></textarea>
</div>
<button type="submit">Send Message</button>
</form>

How to make a form work with PHP?

<?php

if($_POST) {
$visitor_name = "";
$visitor_email = "";
$email_title = "";
$concerned_department = "";
$visitor_message = "";

if(isset($_POST['visitor_name'])) {
$visitor_name = filter_var($_POST['visitor_name'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
}

if(isset($_POST['visitor_email'])) {
$visitor_email = str_replace(array("\r", "\n", "%0a", "%0d"), '', $_POST['visitor_email']);
$visitor_email = filter_var($visitor_email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
}

if(isset($_POST['email_title'])) {
$email_title = filter_var($_POST['email_title'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
}

if(isset($_POST['concerned_department'])) {
$concerned_department = filter_var($_POST['concerned_department'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
}

if(isset($_POST['visitor_message'])) {
$visitor_message = htmlspecialchars($_POST['visitor_message']);
}

if($concerned_department == "billing") {
$recipient = "billing@domain.com";
}
else if($concerned_department == "marketing") {
$recipient = "marketing@domain.com";
}
else if($concerned_department == "technical support") {
$recipient = "tech.support@domain.com";
}
else {
$recipient = "contact@domain.com";
}

$headers = 'MIME-Version: 1.0' . "\r\n"
.'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8' . "\r\n"
.'From: ' . $visitor_email . "\r\n";

if(mail($recipient, $email_title, $visitor_message, $headers)) {
echo "<p>Thank you for contacting us, $visitor_name. You will get a reply within 24 hours.</p>";
} else {
echo '<p>We are sorry but the email did not go through.</p>';
}

} else {
echo '<p>Something went wrong</p>';
}

?>

And that’s it.

Developing a simple contact form in PHP is relatively easy when you’re knowledgeable about the fundamentals. You start by writing the HTML required to create input elements for information such as the user’s name, email address, contact number, etc.

The following step is writing CSS to be sure that the contact type blends in perfectly with the rest of the site. The last step involves writing the PHP code, which will take the data from the contact form and safely mail it to you.