One of the notable pages missing from this Web site is a contact page.
Right now I have no way for anyone to contact this company anywhere on this Web site.
There's no contact information anywhere.
Fortunately, Joomla
ships with a Contacts component.
And in that Contacts component, you have the ability to list your contact
information, and you can have a contact form.
People can fill out that contact form to contact you, and that way you don't
have to put your e-mail address on the Web site directly, which might lead to a
spammer picking it up, and sending you all kinds of e-mail you don't want.
So to do this, I'm going to hop into the back-end of Joomla,
and I'm going to start working with the Contacts component.
So here under Components, we have a component called Contacts, and here on the
flyout, there are two options;
the Categories, and the Contacts.
These categories are different than the categories that you have associated with articles.
So these are contact categories instead of article categories.
But the process works exactly the same.
We're going to create a category for Contacts.
We're going to create the contact itself, and then we're going to link that
contact to the menu, and that's what I am going to cover in this video.
So, I am going to start by making a contact category,
and when you click this, you'll see that we only have one category by default;
that's the Uncategorized category.
I am going to go ahead and make a new category, and I am going to do that by
clicking the New button, and I am going to give this a title.
Let's call it The Management.
That's all you need to put in to create a category, just the same way you saw
with the article categories, works the same for the Contact categories.
And I am going to say Save & Close.
So that's step one.
Step two is to create the contact itself, and that would be under my Contacts
link, which I can get to here in left navigation, or I can go to the dropdown, and
select it from there.
As you see, I have no contacts right now.
But I can add one by clicking the big green New button, and I am going to fill
out this information.
So first of all is the Name.
In your Exercise Files, you'll find that I have given you the company address
and contact information here.
You can just go ahead and copy the company name as the name that we'll put
in. Highlight, Ctrl+C or Command+C to copy: Ctrl+V or Command+V to paste here into the Web site.
The Category, of course, will be The Management.
And that's all you need to configure here in this particular tab.
Now I am going to switch to the Contact Details Tab, and here is where I can put
in some additional information.
I don't have to fill in absolutely everything, but I'm going to fill in a few of these things.
One thing that you should fill in if you want a contact form is the e-mail address.
So I am going to highlight that;
Ctrl+C or Command+C, and then Ctrl+V or Command+V. The e-mail address is really
important, because if you don't have an e-mail address specified here, the
contact form won't appear.
This Email address is the receiving e-mail address.
So when someone comes to your Web site, and they fill out the contact form, this
is where the contents of that form will be e-mailed; to this address.
This address, however, will not be displayed on the Web site.
If you do not specify an e-mail address in this blank, you will not have a
contact form on the Web site,
and the reason why is very simple;
if somebody fills out that contact form, and hits Submit, but yet, there's no
e-mail address specified, where do the contents of that contact form go? We don't know.
So that's why we don't even give you the contact form at all.
Then we're going to put in the address for the Web site,
and that is right here: 123 KinetEco Drive, Ctrl+C or Command+C to copy; Ctrl+C
or Command+V to paste.
Then I am going to put in my City, State, and ZIP; that's Los Angeles, California,
90025, so Los Angeles, CA, 90025.
I am not going to fill in the Country; KinetECO is pretty much doing business in
the US right now. And I am going to copy over the phone number, highlight that,
Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V to paste that on into the Telephone blank.
You could continue to fill out these blanks if you want, but that's our basic
information here for KinetECO.
And I am going to go ahead now, and just say Save & Close.
So we've created a category for our contact, we've created the contact itself;
is there anything showing on the Web site?
Well, no, not yet, because this is a component, and the only way components
display on the Web site is if they are linked through the menu, and we haven't
made a menu link yet.
So that's our last step in this process.
So, I am going to go to Menus > Main Menu > Add a New Menu Item.
And my Menu Item Type, I will click on the Select button.
This time, rather than going to Articles, I want to link to a contact,
so I should look under the Contacts portion of the screen.
And here inside of Contacts, I have several choices. The one I want, though, is a single contact.
I'm just linking to this one contact's information.
Which contact would I want to link to?
Click on this button, there's only one,
so that's the one I am going to pick.
And then for my Menu Title, I will just call this Contact.
That's all of the required information that I want to fill out.
I want this menu item to show up at the same level as Home,
so my Menu Item Root will stay exactly where it is,
and I'm going to go ahead, and say Save & Close.
Now, when I refresh the front-end of the Web site, I have a link for my Contact page.
When I click on that, as you see here, I have my contact information listed
here, and then underneath, I have a Contact Form.
When I click on that, this will pull up the contact form that I can fill out.
Now, I'm not terribly excited about the way this page looks.
I think these icons are kind of cheesy, and the contact form is really hard to find,
so I am going to change a little bit of the formatting, and I will show you how
to do that in the next video.