Contact us functionality in Rails 3

Question

I want to make a contact us form in Rails 3 with the following fields:

• Name
• Email
• Message title
• Message body

The posted messages are intended to go to my email address so I don't neccessarily must store the messages in the database. Do I have to use ActionMailer, any gem or plugin for it?

Answer 1

This tutorial is an excellent example - and it's Rails 3

Update:

This article is a better example than the one I posted earlier, works flawlessly

Second Update:

I would also recommend merging-in some of the techniques outlined in this railscast on the active_attr gem, where Ryan Bates walks you through the process of setting up a tabless model for a contact page.

Third Update:

I wrote my own test-driven blog post about it

Answer 2

I updated the implementation to be as close as possible to the REST specification.

Basic setup

You can use the mail_form gem. After installing simply create a model named Message similar as it is described in the documentation.

# app/models/message.rb
class Message < MailForm::Base
  attribute :name,          :validate => true
  attribute :email,         :validate => /\A([\w\.%\+\-]+)@([\w\-]+\.)+([\w]{2,})\z/i
  attribute :message_title, :validate => true
  attribute :message_body,  :validate => true

  def headers
    {
      :subject => "A message",
      :to => "[email protected]",
      :from => %("#{name}" <#{email}>)
    }
  end
end

This will already allow you to test sending emails via the console.

Contact page

In order to create a separate contact page do the following.

# app/controllers/messages_controller.rb
class MessagesController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :html

  def index
  end

  def create
    message = Message.new(params[:contact_form])
    if message.deliver
      redirect_to root_path, :notice => 'Email has been sent.'
    else
      redirect_to root_path, :notice => 'Email could not be sent.'
    end
  end

end

Setup the routing ..

# config/routes.rb
MyApp::Application.routes.draw do
  # Other resources
  resources :messages, only: [:index, :create]
  match "contact" => "messages#index"
end

Prepare a form partial ..

// app/views/pages/_form.html.haml
= simple_form_for :contact_form, url: messages_path, method: :post do |f|
  = f.error_notification

  .form-inputs
    = f.input :name
    = f.input :email, label: 'Email address'
    = f.input :message_title, label: 'Title'
    = f.input :message_body, label: 'Your message', as: :text

  .form-actions
    = f.submit 'Submit'

And render the form in a view ..

// app/views/messages/index.html.haml
#contactform.row
  = render 'form'

Answer 3

I couldn't make the code of this example work and I think it makes things a bit complex since your creating a model.

Anywat, I made a working contact form and blogged about it.. the text is in portuguese but the code itself is (mostly) in english http://www.rodrigoalvesvieira.com/formulario-contato-rails/

Note: I used sendmail, not SMTP.