In the previous video, I added this Contact page to the Web site, and this is the
way the Contact page currently looks.
I have my contact information listed at the top, and when I click on the Contact
Form here at the bottom, I have a very nice Contact Form available here.
But it's not a terribly attractive page, and I don't like the fact that the
Contact Form is hidden under this slider kind of thing.
I also really hate these icons.
They are dated from the Mambo days, I believe,
so they are at least seven years old.
So, I would like to take those out as well.
Let's take a look at how I can format this Contact page.
Here in the back-end of Joomla,
I am going to go to Components > Contacts > Contacts.
Then I am going to go to the Options item that's up here upper right corner,
and here inside of my Contact Options, I am going to change the settings for a few things.
First of all, my Display format, by default, is set to Sliders, and that is what
you see in action here on the front-end of the Web site.
Click on things, some things disappear, and other things reappear.
That was really cool for the articles, but I really don't like it on the Contact Form,
So I am going to change this display to Plain.
The other thing I would like to do is get rid of those icons.
So, here under the Icons tab, right now my setting is for Icons, but I don't
have any icons specified.
I can specify icons, I can upload icons, I can just upload new ones, and
specify which icons I want to associated with which fields here for my
contact information.
But really, I don't want any icons at all.
So I am just going to change my settings here from Icons to None.
Notice that text is also an option, but I think it's pretty self-explanatory
what the contact information is.
We have a US-based audience, who is used to looking at US-based addresses,
so I think the page is pretty self-explanatory.
I don't need any extra text.
Now I am going to say Save & Close, and when I refresh the front-end of the Web site,
now I have my contact information listed here at the top, and then underneath, I
have my contact e-mail form, and all of the icons are gone.
Now, you may still be kind of unhappy with the way this works, and looks, because
it does say Contact here, and Contact Form here; you might want to get rid of
those. You can get rid of those through CSS.
You can just sort of set those to display none, so that they don't appear here on the page.
You could certainly use CSS to alter the formatting of that address there at the
top of the page, and the alignment of the page.
Some people have asked me before about this contact form. A very common question
I get is, how can I add more fields to the form? Additional fields. Or take away
some of the fields, in some cases.
And unfortunately, the answer with the Joomla
contact form, this default one that comes with Joomla,
that's part of core; the answer is, you really can't.
It's quite involved if you're ever going to alter this, and there's really
no need to do that.
There are a number of really great contact form extensions that are out there.
You can build your own form using one of these third-party extensions.
The one I recommend strongly is called RSForm!Pro from a place
called rsjoomla.com.
It's a great extension.
It has a small price tag associated with it, but it's well worth it, and you can
build your form to do just anything.
It'll also record everything from that form into a spreadsheet that you can then
export in CSV format, or you can look at it in Excel, or you can look at it in
Access, or whatever it is that you want to do with that data.
So, the form itself really can't be altered.