Table of contents for Contact Form

1. Creating a contact form using classes part 1

Recently I was asked at work to build a PHP email contact form that could do some specific things.

• Allow the user to choose different departments/emails to send their submission to
• Allow the user to input specific things into boxes such as telephone number, order ID
• Be easy to extend so a non programmer could add an extra input at a later date

Then there were a few things I wanted to do.

• Use classes to separate logic from layout
• Clean and validate all input

Now there’s a lot of websites that show you how to do email forms, but most just send a users email address, name and message via post to a separate PHP file and then compose and email. While this is nice, simple and works it doesn’t allow for all the things that was asked and I felt should be done.

In part 2 I’ll show you how I started to build my classes.

A basic autoloader is this:

function __autoload($class_name) {
require_once $class_name . '.php';
}

As is said this is pretty basic, but it gets the job done, but this will load all the classes from a single folder, what if you have lots of classes and have them all in different folders? Well we need to modify this function to cope with that. First though is the class names, normally you would do a class like this:

class MyClass
{
}

In order to have a class loaded from a folder we need to change that class name to include the folder we want it to be part of. So our original class becomes this:

class Bases_MyClass
{
}

Then we can modify our autoloader to load from folders:

function __autoload($class_name) {
$class_name = str_replace('_','/',$class_name);
require_once $class_name . '.php';
}

This will now load Bases_MyClass from the file Bases/MyClass.php now that wasn’t so hard, just put an underscore every time you want to use another folder.