Will there be an update that includes an intuitive “Contact Us” page? I don’t see any reference to it other than a few coding tries. Also, no specific instructions.
For now I am redirecting Contact Us to a basic RapidWeaver Classic Contact page.
Everything you need to build a contact page is in Elements. There is not yet a pre-built version, but it is straightforward to build. See below for an example from a working Elements website.
I think the plan is that eventually there will be a pre-built version that you can drag onto a page with everything needed for a basic contact form.
Plus if you got the Elements Marketplace you can find a few FREE projects that include simple contact forms that you could copy and paste into your project. Look at the North Eleven sample for a contact form.
I can use the form and build one like this, but I don’t see anywhere to input how to email the response. When I click submit, where does it go?
The other option is how would I use a Contact Us button to bring up a mail:to while obfuscating the email address from spambots?
When you are creating the form there is a FORM component, the settings for this component allow you to enter the email details used to send the email. When building a form the contents of the form are all placed inside the FORM component.
You use the components that are part of the form system to build up your contact form.
For example, if you add the SUBMIT component, then you can place a regular Elements BUTTON component inside it allowing you to style it like any other component. The SUBMIT component will handle the whole process when the user clicks on the button. It will use the settings you created for the FORM component to send the email.
Edited: I now redirect to a Google Form page which then automatically sends responses to our organization’s email address on gmail. (Glad I thought of that!) Super easy answer for a newbie.
Big question for me is what do you link the Submit button to?
Have added a contact page to a site and use the same credentials in the Form as I do for successful FTP transfers but when I hit SEND nothing happens. Could not find a Dev video on it and the two example projects both show the button linking back to the same page it is on which can’t be right.
The submit button should not be linked to anything, instead it is placed inside a submit component, which will handle the response to the submit button being clicked.
Not sure why you would be using FTP transfer information, the form needs to be using an email address, a mail host and port number. All of this information is inside the FORM component. The contact form is built within this form component using a combination of the form components and regular Elements ones.
Yes, I have all the correct credentials as far as I can tell under Authentication in the FORM settings. Host, Port, Username and Password are all as per what works when I publish. Presumably the ‘To address’ is where you want the emails to be sent to.
The Submit component has nothing but a button inside it but it does not do anything when clicked. Figured there must be a loop that I had not closed but obviously not. Will keep playing around.
EDIT Updated PHP from 7.0 to 8.3 but still get the same result.
Aloha @jbyfield Yes you need to be using PHP 8.3 for this to work.
The TO email address should be the same as the username address you entered.
Finally, from experience, I have found that often Elements does not upload all of the files associated with the form. To prevent a problem I always go through the extra step of marking the page as changed. You can only do this by right-clicking on the page. Then do a publish and you can ensure that all of the files associated with the form will be uploaded. Normally, there are around 686 of them.
You also need to ensure that you have both the Success and Error components somewhere on your form, the appropriate one will be displayed if there is an error or a successful submission.
I just wanted to clarify that publishing settings (FTP/SFTP) and email settings (SMTP) are completely separate — and not interchangeable .
When you publish your site, you’re using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or SFTP (Secure FTP) to upload your files to your web server. These settings typically include:
- FTP/SFTP host (e.g., ftp.yourdomain.com)
- Port (usually 21 for FTP or 22 for SFTP)
- Username and password (for your hosting account)
However, when submitting a form using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), you’re sending an email through your mail server, which usually has a completely different set of credentials and connection details. These may include:
- SMTP host (e.g., smtp.yourdomain.com, smtp.gmail.com, or a third-party mail service)
- SMTP port (often 587, 465, or 25 depending on encryption)
- Username and password for the mail account you’re sending from (this might be an actual email address)
So even though the username and password might look similar in some hosting setups, they often aren’t — and the hosts and ports are different.
What to do:
If you’re unsure of what your SMTP settings should be, the best course of action is to contact your hosting provider or check their email setup documentation. They can give you the exact SMTP host, port, and credentials you need to enter in the Form settings.
Thanks both. Starting to realise why I dropped having a contact page in the first place 
Thanks for explaining all that Ben. Have tried various iterations with no success so have asked my host.
Is that number relative to the complexity of the page though? When I look at the contact page on GB24 Fins I see you have a lot of things going on - that’s not a complaint by the way, I like the way it looks. On my contact page I have two globals and two containers. If I mark all pages and resources as changed and do a full site republish I get around 460 files in total. That’s for the whole site. The site is very basic, text dominated and with relatively few resources.
The TO email address thing is interesting and may be where I come unstuck. I am the website admin so it will be my username address but any emails that go through the website I want to be delivered to a different email address. If I can’t do that then I will drop the idea of the contact page. Ideally emails received via the website could be sent to more than one email address.
Anyway, that’s for another day. I have learnt a lot about the potential hidden in Elements by looking at what you have done on your sites. My only comment is that you need to change your name because when I see your logo at the bottom of the page it makes me think that RealMac did it 
I’ll take that as a compliment!
I have found that across the five sites I’m working on the number of files associated with the contact page has consistently been 686, I don’t know why though.
UPDATE: This appears to have been fixed with todays release as the number of files now appears to include the contact page.
I made the contact page index.php instead of index.html and the next republish nearly tripled the number of files and resolved the 404 error for the missing apipack files that others have mentioned.
The form still doesn’t work though.
Host told me that because I am sending from the same server that my email is configured on the SMTP host only required ‘localhost’ as the name and port 25. Have tried so many iterations of that and what Ben posted above but cannot get it to work. I have done at least a dozen full site republishes this morning and have now reverted to the .html page suffix. With my last republish with the host recommended credentials I at least see the error message I set up, before that the button was totally unresponsive. Will try the host again then I think I will delete the page.