action.php for a website send message form

Question

I have a form on a website to send a message, the message should be send to an email address.

As I am new to website building I am playing around but can't get the form working with a action.php file. When I have uploaded the HTML code and the action-page.php to the server (in the same subfolder) the message I type on the website is not send at all. I receive no email and when I click the send button and I am forwarded to a blank page in the browser. Preferably i just stay on the same page and get a "Your message has been sent" notification, but this is a "nice-to-have" I just want to get it working.

I used: https://html.form.guide/email-form/php-form-to-email.html as a reference for the code.

1. What is wrong or why it is not working?

The code for the website message form is the following:

<div class="o-screen-contact__col-form">
    <form class="c-form js-form-validation" action="action-page.php" method="post">
      <label for="contact-name">Jouw naam</label>
      <input class="c-form__field" id="contact-name" type="text" placeholder="Bijvoorbeeld, Jade van de Ven" required>
      <label for="contact-email">Jouw e-mail</label>
      <input class="c-form__field" id="contact-email" type="email" placeholder="[email protected]" required>
      <label for="contact-message">Jouw bericht</label>
      <textarea class="c-form__field" id="contact-message" name="name" placeholder="Schrijf hier jouw bericht of zorg" required></textarea>
      <fieldset class="u-text-right">
        <button class="c-button c-button--primary" type="submit" name="contact-submit">Zend mij een bericht</button>
      </fieldset>
    </form>
  </div>

I used the post method and made an action-page.php file for the actual message to be send to an email adress.

The action-page.php file looks like this:

<?php
$name = $_POST['contact-name'];
$visitor_email = $_POST['contact-email'];
$message = $_POST['contact-message'];
?>


<?php
    $email_from = '[email protected]';

    $email_subject = "Nieuwe email website ontzorg-zwolle";

    $email_body = "You have received a new message from the user $contact-name.\n".
                        "Here is the message:\n $contact-message".
?>

<?php

  $to = "[email protected]";

  $headers = "From: $email_from \r\n";

  $headers .= "Reply-To: $visitor_email \r\n";

  mail($to,$email_subject,$email_body,$headers);

?>

2. Where to put the action-page.php file on the server

I have put the action-page.php file in the same folder als the index.html file (where the message form is in). Is that the right place? Or do I need to put the file in some other place to be called properly?

Typically you would have a index.php or html page in your top level folder on your server. There may be a pages folder, with css folder, and perhaps a javascript folder. Depending on where your action page is placed, you access it in child folder by using a /. So if you have a file on the top level folder named index.php and its form is sending a post to action-page.php that is in the pages folder, the action attribute would look like; action="pages/action-page.php" — dale landry
– dale landry, Commented May 17, 2020 at 7:39
And if you are going up one level in file level on your server, it would look like ../. So say I have a file name customers.php that lives in the second level of the server and there is a form and that form is posting to a file called user.php that lives in includes folder that is also second level in the server, I must leave the pages folder and go up one level to access the includes folder and subsequent user.php my action would look like: action="../includes/user.php" — dale landry
– dale landry, Commented May 17, 2020 at 7:51
Also, typically when handling form data via post, you should first see if the submit button that handles the form submission is set using isset(). if(isset($_POST['contact-submit'])){ //--> check and handle validate sanitize user input etc... } — dale landry
– dale landry, Commented May 17, 2020 at 7:53

Tharun Gnanaselvam · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-17 14:24:02Z

1

You've done everything correctly, but you missed the name attribute in the input tags.

Your code should be like this,

<input class="c-form__field" id="contact-name" name="contact-name" type="text" placeholder="Bijvoorbeeld, Jade van de Ven" required>

You have to add the name attribute in all the input tags like above code...

answered May 17, 2020 at 14:24

Tharun Gnanaselvam

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