How to Modify the Contact Page in Joomla

How to Modify the Contact Page in Joomla
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Introduction

When you’re building a website for your business one of the first things you want to get working right and be presentable is the contact form. Giving people the ability to contact you through your website is crucial for businesses and personal sites alike. In this article we’ll discuss how to modify the contact form in the popular Joomla open source content management system. While Joomla is a fairly complicated piece of software, modifying the contact page is pretty straight forward and can be done by beginner users in Joomla.

Creating the Menu Item

So, how do I modify the contact page in Joomla? Glad you asked, let’s get started. First thing you’ll need to do is make a link to the contact page in Joomla. This is not done by default in the main menu. Select the menu link from the top and go to “main menu”. Once there, you can add a new menu item by clicking the “add” button. Select the contacts link. You’ll be given the option to select two types of contact layouts. The first will display all the contacts that are available in that category. The standard form only uses one contact. For this article we’ll use the standard form. You can name the link anything you want and give it an alias also. There are some more advanced parameters you can also edit on this screen.

Creating the User to Contact

Creating the user

Once you’ve got the link setup you will see it in the main menu at the bottom. Don’t worry you can always move it up of down in the menu configuration page. Clicking on the link brings up the contact form but doesn’t have our details in yet.

The contact form

To add your details first you’ll need to either delete the default user that is listed in Components > Contacts. Placing a tick mark on the user and selecting edit will allow you to change the details of the user. All the details can be edited and changed to your liking. Under the parameters section on the right side you can change what you would like shown and what parameters you want to hide. This is useful when you want to hide certain details about the contact information. To place an image with the contact information you’ll need to upload to the media gallery prior to creating the contact. Make sure the email address is filled in even if it is set to “hide”. The email address provided will be used to send the contact form details that are entered by the user.

Creating More Contacts Using Joomla Contact Page

You don’t have to stop with just one contact. You can create contacts so your users can contact anyone in your company. Creating categories for your contacts will help to keep your contacts in order and make it easier for users to find that info. If you use categories then you’ll need to select the “contact category layout” and select the appropriate category to display.

Getting the Look you Want by Modifying the Joomla Contact Page

Selecting parameters when creating each contact will give you the ability to control how the page flows with information. You can opt to show all details or just the minimum. Joomla gives you this powerful ability with its contact component. So, now you don’t have to ask, “How do I modify the Contact page in Joomla?” You now have your page and can modify it at any time.