Beginner PHP Tutorial - 102 - Creating a Simple Contact Form Part 3 Video Lecture | PHP for Absolute Beginners: From Novice to PHP Master - Web Development

so let's go in here and we need to first
of all set a few variables up so we need
to say two is equal to something and
that's just clearly my email address so
I'm going to be sending this to my own
email address since it's a contact us
form the inquiries are going to come to
me so this is my email address the next
one is the subject so I'm just going to
pre define the subject as contact form
submitted just to let me know when I
receive an email the subject is contact
form submitted and what's this going to
do is it's going to just let me know
that a contact form has been submitted
that's all basically yeah it's up to you
what you set the header to now the body
is going to equal the contact text so
the text that the contact the user sorry
has entered in this text field here and
we are going to also set headers and the
headers is just going to be from and
then the email address is going to come
here so what why do we do this so let's
I'll just put the variable in first so
contact email now what this is going to
do is when I receive the email on my
squirrel mail client here when I get the
email it's going to say it's from and
the email address that the user actually
typed in in the HTML form this way what
I can do is I can quickly press reply
and it will set up a reply to this email
address where it came from
so it's really nifty way of being able
to quickly instantly reply to a user Wow
after you've had contact form submitted
and if you don't understand what I mean
then I'll show you a bit later when I
actually receive the email so everything
seems set up now we've got the contact
text in there
we've got from and we need the also the
contact name so we can put this anywhere
really we could say body equals and
contact name and then we can append onto
it remember when we want to do a line
break we need to use double quotation
marks we can append a line break on
there so we'll have the contacts name
and then a line break and then what
they've written in the form so now that
we've got each value here we can use the
mail function so mail the parameters are
first of all who it's to and then the
subject and then the body and then the
headers but what we want to do is we
want to double check that the email has
actually been sent so we can enclose
this in an if statement and what this
does is if this returns true it means
the mail has been successfully sent so
we can echo out a confirmation message
and we can say if mail then echo mail or
or thanks for contacting us we'll
remember to escape that character there
because we're using single quotation
marks and we used a single quotation
mark inside the string with the single
quotation marks we'll be in touch soon
for example otherwise we want to let
them know that we couldn't send the mail
at this time we're not going to be
echoing out any errors so we want to put
an @ sign in front of the mail so if
this does return any errors we're not
actually displaying these to the user so
now we can say echo sorry an error
occurred
who spoke heard well please try again
later
okay so if the male sent and we're
silencing this so if we do receive any
errors from this it won't be displayed
to our user we're going to say thanks
for contacting us we'll be in touch soon
the you now will then be sent
automatically even though it's inside an
if condition and then otherwise we're
going to say sorry an error occurred
peace try again later let's go ahead and
save the changes and we'll come over to
our contact form and test this out so
I've got my squirrel mail client opened
at the moment this is a test email that
came in earlier when I was testing this
so don't worry about that for now but
we'll let's fill out this form to see if
we get an email back so let's say Alex
my email address I'm going to set to
Alex at PHP academy' de org and here I'm
going to say hi just wondered how to
well we can write anything really how to
create a PHP file something silly lilacs
we're doing doing a PHP tutorial so why
not
so now let's click send thanks for
contacting us we'll be in touch soon
let's go over to the squirrel now and
click inbox and you can see that I've
got an email from Alex at PHP academy'
de org remember the email address that
we are saying it from is this email here
that we filled out let's go ahead and
click on it okay so it says now Alex
this is the user that has sent submit to
this form so the name of the person that
submitted the form and then like I said
before we're breaking down and we're
saying hi just wondered how to create a
PHP file so we've got the name of the
user here and we've got the body of the
text that they fill down the text area
here so now when we go to click reply
here what it'll automatically do is
reply to the email address that the user
supplied in here so this is a really
useful way of doing things because then
you also got their text here their
question that they asked here
and you can just come here and type in
your reply here so that's how to create
a basic contact form in PHP and there's
a couple of things that you need to take
into account before you actually put
this on a public server