Repository navigation
Contact form
Most sites need one thing above all else: a way for someone to get in touch without having to think about it. The contact form module adds a form you can drop onto any page, and an inbox in your admin area where everything that comes through it lands.
Where it lives now. Enquiries used to have an Inbox link of their own in the sidebar. They now sit on the shared Inbox screen, on a Contact form tab beside live chat if you have it. Old links still work - they just carry you to the tab.
Messages stay on your own site rather than scattering into whatever mailbox you happen to use that week. You still get an email telling you something has arrived, but the conversation itself lives somewhere you can find it again.
Edit any page, and add the Contact Form block wherever you want it. That is the whole job. The form appears on the live page with the fields you have chosen, and anything submitted goes straight to your inbox.
You can put one on as many pages as you like. They all feed the same inbox.
Every form has a Form title - "Get in touch", "Request a quote". Two separate settings, because they are two separate questions:
- Form title - what the form is called. Worth filling in even when nobody sees it, because it is how you tell one form's enquiries from another's everywhere else on the site.
- Show the form title - whether it is drawn as a heading above the form. Turn it off when the page already says what the form is, so the words are not there twice.
If you have the Unified Inbox, the block gains a Deliver enquiries to setting listing your inboxes. Point the sales form at sales@ and the accounts form at accounts@, and each enquiry arrives in that inbox as ordinary post: it counts towards that inbox, it is read by whoever reads that inbox, and it stops appearing under the separate Contact form heading. Leave it on Nowhere and everything carries on exactly as it did.
Without the Unified Inbox installed the setting is not offered at all, because there is nowhere else for a message to go.
Nobody enjoys filling in a long form, so only two fields are fixed: name and message. Everything else is yours to turn on or off:
- Phone - show it or not, and if shown, decide whether it is required.
- Company - same again.
- Subject - same again.
You can also insist on a first and last name rather than accepting a single word, which cuts down on "hi" and "asdf" arriving in your inbox at three in the morning.
If you collect consent under GDPR, there is a tick box for that too, which you can switch on and word to suit yourself.
The form no longer saves up its complaints until someone presses Send.
- Email address - if what they have typed is not a valid address, they are told as soon as they move on to the next field, rather than after they have finished the whole form.
- Message - a quiet grey note in the bottom corner of the message box counts them up to the ten characters the form asks for, and disappears once they get there. It is a nudge, not a telling-off. The proper warning in red only appears if they leave the message box still short, or press Send.
An empty field they have not touched yet says nothing at all. Tabbing straight through a blank form does not turn it red - that is what Send is for.
Your thank-you message takes the place of the Send button, and the form stays where it is with every box emptied ready for another go. It answers the press they just made, in the spot they were already looking at, and with no button there they cannot send the same enquiry twice by pressing it again. It used to swap the whole form out for the message, which was tidy right up until somebody had a second thing to ask and had to reload the page to get the form back.
Start typing again and the thank-you note goes, the Send button comes back, and nobody is left looking at "thanks, we'll be in touch" over a half-written second enquiry.
Everything that comes in appears under Inbox in your admin sidebar. Open a message and you get the full conversation in one place: what they sent, when, and every reply that has gone back.
With Unified Inbox installed, enquiries are answered there instead. The contact form's own tab stands down so there are not two places to answer the same person, and everything on this page about fields, spam and tidying up carries on exactly as before. Colleagues who can see the contact form but not the hub keep this tab. Uninstall the hub and it comes straight back, with nothing lost.
You can:
- Reply directly from the message, without leaving the site.
- Delete a message you do not want to keep.
- Export your messages, if you want them somewhere else.
Each of those is a separate permission, so you can let someone answer enquiries without also letting them delete the lot. See Managing users for how permissions are handed out.
Each person who answers messages can set their own sign-off, so replies go out signed by whoever actually wrote them rather than by the site. It is stored against your own account, and the version used is kept with each reply - so editing your signature later does not quietly rewrite what you sent last month.
Under Contact form > My Signature you choose how you would like to write it. All three are kept side by side, so trying one and going back to another loses nothing.
Rich text. Type it. Bold, links, lists, and nothing to think about. This is what signatures have always been here, and it is still the right answer for most people.
HTML. Paste in the signature your organisation already uses - the one with the logo, the ruled line and the small print about the company number. Tables, inline styles, images and links all come through as written.
Two things are worth knowing. Anything that runs on its own is removed when you save: scripts, and image fallbacks written as onerror. That is not fussiness - this markup ends up in a customer's inbox rather than in your admin, and a signature has no business running anything. And any image has to be at a full web address, because an inbox has nowhere to look up a file sitting on your own machine.
Page builder. Build it out of the same blocks the email designs use - logo, text, two columns, a dividing line, social links. Handy if you want something smarter than plain text but would rather not write markup, and it picks up your site's own colours and font as it goes.
Whichever kind you pick, your Name, Job title and Phone number live on the same screen, and they matter most for the HTML and page-builder kinds: an owner can hand the same signature design to everybody and let each person's own details drop into it. Write these placeholders where the details should go:
| Placeholder | What it becomes |
|---|---|
{{FULL_NAME}} |
Your name (or your account's display name, if you leave it blank) |
{{JOB_TITLE}} |
Your job title |
{{EMAIL}} |
Your email address, straight off your account |
{{PHONE_DISPLAY}} |
Your phone number as you would write it - 020 7946 0123
|
{{PHONE_E164}} |
The same number in the form a phone can dial - +442079460123
|
The last two are a pair: use the tidy one where the number is read, and the dialling one behind a tel: link, so tapping it on a phone actually rings you.
A placeholder you have not filled in simply disappears rather than turning up in somebody's inbox as a set of curly brackets. There is a Save and preview button on the page that shows exactly what will be sent, with your details filled in.
When you reply from the inbox, your visitor gets an ordinary email. If they reply to that, it goes to your real mailbox, not back into Cactus, and the thread splits in half.
With the Google AI Studio module installed and a key pasted into it, there is a Suggest reply button under the writing box.
Press it and the enquiry - and every reply on it since - goes off and comes back as three drafts. Click one to try it in the box, where you can see how it actually reads. The tick keeps it; the cross takes it back out and puts back whatever you had written before you started looking. Click a different one to try that instead.
From the moment you tick, it is your reply: edit it and send it like anything else. Your signature still goes on the bottom, and nothing leaves until you press Send Reply.
If the last message on the enquiry is your own - you replied, and nothing came back - the button says Suggest a follow-up and writes a chase instead of an answer.
No button? No key, or no module. Nothing is sent anywhere until you press it.
The reply you type, and the automatic "thanks for getting in touch" if you have one switched on, both go out in your site's email design - the same logo, colours and footer as your other email. Nothing to set up: they use your site's default email wrapper design, which is whichever published one sits highest in the priority order under Layouts → Email Wrapper. Change your mind later and your replies follow along. If you have not made one at all, they arrive as a tidy centred card rather than as bare text.
There is no picker for this on the contact form, and that is on purpose. The form's settings live on the block, so a picker there would let one form on one page disagree with another about what your email looks like. If you want replies to look different from your order emails, publish a second design and promote it - the same lever you already use everywhere else.
The Reply Catcher add-on solves exactly that. It watches your mailbox and threads the replies back onto the original conversation. It is optional, and the contact form works perfectly well without it.
Two things work away quietly in the background. There is a limit on how many messages can be sent from the same place in a given stretch of time, which stops the obvious flooding. And submissions are treated as untrusted text throughout.
That last point is worth a sentence. When a message is emailed to you, every word the visitor typed is escaped first, so nothing they submit can smuggle formatting, links or anything else into your notification. What you see is what they actually typed, punctuation and all - not something dressed up to look like it came from somewhere else.
Enquiries do not need keeping forever, and under data-protection rules they generally should not be. The module clears out messages older than the age you set, once a day, without you having to remember.
Set it to suit your own retention policy. If you would rather keep everything, you can.
- Reply Catcher - threading real mailbox replies back into the inbox
- Managing users - who is allowed to read, answer and delete
- Managing pages - adding the form block to a page
- Modules - installing and updating add-ons