Formmail and JOOMLA

[diana8760]

Has anyone ever used formmail successfully in concert with Joomla? I have a background in web design, but I am new to JOOMLA. I have used formmail successfully in the past on regular websites. I have two simple forms that I am trying to get working on a Joomla website. I have done testmail.php and it works perfectly. Unfortunately, when I try to send from the website I get the dreaded "no_valid_recipients" error. I have checked the code over and over and cannont find any errors. I guess I just need to know if it is even possible to use it through Joomla, although I can't see why I shouldn't be able to.

[diana8760]

OK, never mind. After two days of trying to figure this out I finally found the very simple answer. Yes, you can use formmail with Joomla. You have to make sure email cloaking is turned off. To do this you can simply place {emailcloak=off} in the article with the form.

[onl]

OK, never mind. After two days of trying to figure this out I finally found the very simple answer. Yes, you can use formmail with Joomla. You have to make sure email cloaking is turned off. To do this you can simply place {emailcloak=off} in the article with the form.

I originally used Formmail using iFrames with Joomla but it has complications. In particular, Google indexes the framed document, not the framing document/url so I had to find a way to use Formmail with Joomla's article structure. I spent about 3 hours testing different things to solve the problem and none worked. I was about to surrender when I found your post. I don't know anything about emailcloak but it worked.

Thank you very much Diana for taking the time to post your solution here not knowing who was going to need it.

[teapot]

Do you have a form without a confirmation page then? It's easy to embed the form into the template/article, but what happens when the submit button is pressed and you get taken either to a thank you page or an error page? How do you get those to be wrapped in joomla? I haven't found a way to do that yet...?

Right now I'm using formmail on a joomla site with the lightview plugin - so the form pops up in a pretty overlay window. But as far as search engines are concerned that's the same as an iframe - not a very good solution.

[onl]

I created 2 articles, one with the success message, one with the fail message. In your formmail HTML form, set the success and fail URLs by using hidden fields that formmail provides for and direct them to each of the two articles.

[teapot]

Aha, yeah that's right I remember I considered that now, but I'm using the template, not the fixed thanks page, so that presents a problem. You're right, with a fixed message it's totally doable. I've no idea how I'd pull it off with the goodtemplate.... if anyone has any ideas, enlighten me!

[onl]

I see. Unfortunately, I can't help you with templates. Did you ask the template developer by any chance?

[faridsilva]

Hello, I'm always use joomla with formmail, due to needs of custom forms.
So I construct my forms using jumi component and then just need to create a good-url and bad-url content in joomla to redirect upon form submission.

[teapot]

I see. Unfortunately, I can't help you with templates. Did you ask the template developer by any chance?

I make my own joomla templates.

Hello, I'm always use joomla with formmail, due to needs of custom forms.
So I construct my forms using jumi component and then just need to create a good-url and bad-url content in joomla to redirect upon form submission.

Yeah it's easy if you use good/bad URL, but I am using the good/bad template option in formmail. This means that on submit, the form doesn't always take you to the same static page, but it generates a new page using a html template stored on the server and filling in the variables with data submitted in the form. I don't see a way for this to be embedded into joomla...

[bettondesign]

I use Formmail on all of my Joomla installations (around 100) with no problems.
You can see an example here http://www.walkersfishrestaurant.co.uk/contact-us

I don't have email cloaking turned off but I add the form as a module and only ever use the CodeMirror editor to edit it (WYSIWYG editors tend to 'break' the form code).