Beginner's Guide

4. In Contact Details there are numerous ﬁelds available, which you can choose to ﬁll in or leave

blank.

5. In Display Options you decide which ﬁelds will be displayed. This area is important as you specify

here whether a contact form will be shown or not (Show Contact Form). You can also specify whether

the sender should receive an email copy and you'll be able to conﬁgure some spam protection settings

(Banned E-Mail, Banned Subject, etc). Against "real" spammers, however, this protection is rather

"pathetic".

6. In the ﬁeld Contact Redirect, you can enter another email adress to which the contents of the form

should be sent.

7. The Metadata Options are, like the Publishing Options, available on each single page (Read

more: Why SEO is important for you).

Creating a menu item

You now have a contact but still no form on your website. That is exactly what we are going to create

in this next step. Due to the fact that you can link nestable categories to contacts, you may either have a

single contact form or many of them. It is deﬁnitely possible to create a contact form for each employee

of a big company like Volkswagen (approx. 370,000 employees). How does such a dynamic CMS display

this on a website?

To manage this, Joomla has its own Menu Manager with different layouts. In the Menu Manager, you get

to decide whether you want to have a list of contacts or categories or just a single contact form. At ﬁrst

glance this may seem somewhat confusing but it is well thought out and helpful.

Let's link a single form in the menu for the contact we have just created. Open Menus - Top and click

the New icon. You need three things for a menu link:

1. the Menu Item Type (type of link) for displaying the site and, depending on your choice, a contact or a