dj-say

What is dj-say?

dj-say is an easy to implement and fully customizable contact form designed to work with Django web applications.

Why did I make this?

Look at any basic contact form on almost any website. They all more or less look like this:

Needless to say, they're all pretty much the exact same format, give or take a few small components and changes. dj-say fixes this, by allowing a user to implement a simple, customizable contact form in a very short amount of time, and have it just work.

Getting dj-say Set Up in Less Than 5 Minutes

Initial download and installation

1. Download dj-say as a ZIP file and unzip into a directory.
2. Create a new Django application inside of your project using python manage.py startapp contact.
3. Move all the components inside of dj-say's contact folder into your contact application. Overwrite any duplicates such as views.py and urls.py.
4. Move all contents of the templates folder into your application's main template directory.
5. In your main urls.py make sure to include the new URLs by adding url(r'^contact/', include('contact.urls')),

Setting up SMTP and Mail Access

For dj-say to work, you're going to need some kind of SMTP access. By giving your settings.py access to some kind of SMTP-driven email address, your application will then send emails to that account automatically!

There are plenty of good SMTP services, both free and paid. I recommend using Google SMTP for small projects, though for larger projects where you need additional support and infrastructure there are excellent paid services, like SendGrid.

To set this up, include this code in your settings.py:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
EMAIL_PORT = 000 # Make sure to change this depending on your host's designated SMTP port
EMAIL_HOST = '' # Your SMTP host
EMAIL_HOST_USER = '' # Your SMTP email address
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = '' # Your SMTP email address password
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = EMAIL_HOST_USER

CSS

To include CSS in your contact form, add the typical link element to the HTML template contact_form.html.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{% static 'your_css.css' %}" />

As for writing the actual CSS itself, all of the text boxes are HTML input elements, while the labels are (obviously) label elements.

Some sample code:

label {
  display: block;
  margin-top: 5px;
  margin-bottom: 5px;
  font-family: Helvetica;
  color: #63635F;
}

input {
  width: 400px; /* Set box width. */
  color: #63635F; /* Set text color for input box. */
}

The submit button itself can be customized with:

button #submit {
  width: 400px;
}

Adding your own form components

The form shipped with dj-say consists of 4 lines: name, e-mail address, subject, and content, followed by a submission button.

As an example case, we'll say the new component is an additional text field for specifying what your favorite type of horse is.

Start with the form.py file, and add this line:

contact_favorite_horse = forms.CharField(required=True)

Then move to views.py. Find where the rest of your components are specified into POST variables and add this line: contact_favorite_horse = request.POST.get('contact_favorite_horse', '')

Then, move down the file until you find where the variable called context is declared. context is an array of key-value pairs. Add your horse info to the context.

'favorite_horse': contact_favorite_horse,

The last step is to make sure that you include this new information in your message_template.html file, which is what Django sends to your SMTP service.

In message_template.html add: Favorite Horse: {{ favorite_horse }}

Ta-da! Your new element should be implemented.

Upcoming Features

• Added customization settings
• reCAPTCHA implementation

License

dj-say is registred under the MIT License. This project is free to use, modify, and redistribute by anybody.

Get in Touch

Trying to reach me? Shoot me a message on my site!