You can use the following snippet to retrieve a list of all uiComponents on the current page:

var currentUiComponents = {};
requirejs('uiRegistry').filter(function(item){
   currentUiComponents[item.name] = item;
});
console.log(currentUiComponents);

Our latest Fraud Prevention extension release comes with several great new features to prevent fraud independently in Magento: it now enables you to blacklist customer accounts, lets you block guests and payment processing during checkout and comes with new options to blacklist orders based on e-mail domain and IP address. Besides that you can now easily whitelist blacklisted orders with just one click of a button and enable your custom blacklisting rules for specific customer groups.

Read all about the new extension features below and check our Magento Fraud Prevention product page for more information!

Blacklist Customer Accounts

Using the Customer Blacklisting Settings in the Fraud Prevention config screen, you can now choose to blacklist customer accounts when a customer tries to place or update a fraudulent order (ie. an order triggering a blacklisting rule). The order will be still submitted in the back-end with the status 'blacklisted', but the customer is directly logged out and blocked from logging back in. If the customer is blacklisted during checkout, his shopping cart will also be emptied.

The second customer blacklisting option is even more aggressive, as it can be used to block both logged in customers and guests when they try to place an order using a blacklisted address, or when customers attempt to update their account details with it. Just as with the first option, customers will be immediately blocked and logged out and guests will be confronted with an empty shopping cart en deleted billing details, which will definitely discourage them from placing a fraudulent order again!

As of Fraud Prevention v1.1.0 you can also manually manage the Fraud Status of customers in the Account Information section of the customer details screen, choosing from 'Neutral', 'Blacklisted' or 'Whitelisted'. Blacklisted customers will not be able to access their account anymore and submit new orders until their Fraud Status is changed to 'Neutral' or 'Whitelisted' again.

Block Fraudulent Orders Before Payment

Another new addition in the extension's config screen is the Payment Processing Settings section, which lets you block payments by hiding the payment information section if a blacklisted address is used during checkout. In this way you can block fraudulent orders before they are paid and protect your business from unwanted credit card charge-backs.

Besides that you can also prevent fraudulent orders using the Failed Payment Transaction Settings by adding a fraud suspicion strike to the customer's shipping and/or billing address when a payment transaction fails.

One-click Order Whitelisting

Our new extension release now finally makes it possible to whitelist blacklisted orders by simply clicking the 'Whitelist Order' button in the order details screen. Using the 'Whitelist Customer' button next to it, the current order as well as all future orders by this customer will be whitelisted.

New Blacklisting Rule Options

At the request of our Magento Fraud Prevention users, our plugin now also lets you set up custom blacklisting rules based on the customer's e-mail domain and IP address, providing you with more options to detect and prevent fraud in your webshop.

On top of that you can now choose to enable your rules for specific customers groups in the Customer Groups tab of the blacklisting rule screen, so you can easily exclude trusted customer from your Fraud Prevention rules.

With the new release of our Automatic Customer Group Switching extension you can now execute your group switching rules on demand, as well as set up rules choosing from an extended set of rule conditions.

Read all about the new features below or visit our Magento Automatic Group Switching product page for a full overview of the extension's possibilties!

Execute Customer Group Switching Rules On Demand

Up till now Magento Customer Group Auto-Switching included two options to execute your group switching rules: on specific events, such as customer account creation and order saving, or by batch processing rules periodically using the plugin's integrated Cronjob functionality. In v1.7.0 a third option has been added, which finally makes it possible to execute your group switching rules on demand. This new on demand rule processing option can be used for both single rules and multiple rules at once, at any time you want!

To execute an individual rule, you can simple click the new 'Save And Execute' button at the top of the Rule Information screen:

To bulk process multiple rules at once, select them in the Automatic Customer Group Switching Rules overview, choose the 'Execute Selected Rules on Demand' option from the Actions dropdown menu in the top right corner of the screen and click the 'Submit' button.

When processing a single rule or multiple rules on demand, a rule execution screen will appear which shows which rule(s) and the amount of customers being processed, plus an overview of the group switching activity per customer account. If multiple rules are executed at once, the priority given to these rules in the Rule Information screen will define in which order they are processed.

Because you can now process group switching rules whenever you want, our extension's on demand rule execution option is also very useful for testing your rules, giving you immediate insight in your automatic customer group switching activity!

New Customer Attribute & Sales Order Rule Conditions

The new Automatic Customer Group Switching release also comes with an extended set of rule conditions, adding various new options to the customer attribute and sales order categories, which are highlighted in the overview below:

As a matter of fact, all default customer attributes can now be used to set up your group switching rules, as well as any custom customer attribute that has been added to your Magento install. The custom attributes (if available) are automatically added to the rule condition dropdown menu.

On top of that there are several new order related rule conditions to choose from, which let you configure rules based on the total amount invoiced, refunded and total weight of an order.

The addition of these new rule conditions makes our Automatic Customer Group Switching extension even more flexible, providing you with endless possibilities to automate your customer group management in Magento!

Version 1.11.0 of our bestselling Magento extension comes with several exciting new features, among others the long awaited option to create fully responsive multi-column contact forms. Other important additions are the possibility to prefill and preselect form fields using default values and variables, plus the new custom CSS class option which enables you to fully customize your forms using CSS style sheets.

Read all about the new features below or check our Custom Contact Forms product page for a full overview of the extension's endless possibilities!

Create Form Sections and Multi-column Contact Forms

On top of the countless display and design options already included in Magento Custom Contact Forms such as the pop-up and slide-out form, multi-page and dynamic form, our extension now finally makes it possible to create fully responsive multi-column contact forms!

Just like the Form Page component can be added to the contact form to create multi-page forms, the new Form Section component (which can also be found in the form builder's 'Other' tab) can be used to divide your form into multiple sections and columns.

Once added to the form, the Form Section component can be configured to create a Full Width, 1 Column or 2 Columns layout within the contact form.

The 2 Columns layout will evenly divide the fields within the section over the two columns, while two successive 1 Column layout may contain any amount of form fields per section.

You can adjust the heading type of each section and give it a custom section title (or leave this option empty for no section title).

A multi-column layout can be used in combination with any other display type such as the fore mentioned multi-page, pop-up or slide-out form, but will look best when used in forms with greater widths such as in the example on the left.

Automatically Prefill Forms with Variables

Another great features of our latest Custom Contact Forms release is the addition of the Default Value option for input fields, which allows you to prefill forms with any desired information. What makes this option really interesting is that the Default Value field also supports variables that can be used to auto-complete forms with data regarding products, categories, customers, default shipping/billing addresses and store information.

When creating a new form in the form builder, you will now notice the default 'Name' and 'E-mail' input fields contain the variables {{var customer.getName()}} and {{var customer.getEmail()}}. These variables can be used to automatically prefill your forms for logged in customers with their name and e-mail address. If these variables cannot be found (i.e. the customer is not logged in to his account), the input fields will remain empty on the front-end.

In the same way you could automatically prefill the customer's address using the variable {{var billing_address.getStreet1()}}, in which 'Street1' refers to the first line of the billing address street. Or auto-complete product question forms with any desired attribute such as the product name or SKU using the variables {{var product.getName()}} and {{var product.getSku()}}, which will be auto-completed if the form is embedded on a product page with the custom contact form widget as exemplified below.

You'll notice that all the fore-mentioned variables are composed of the same elements and always contain an object (product, category, customer, shipping_address, billing_address, store) and an attribute code starting with a capital (for example Name, Sku, Street1, etc.):

{{var object.getAttribute()}}

You can find all product attribute codes in the Admin Panel by navigating to Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes. To find the attribute code of other objects, such as a customer account, right-click the attribute field in the back-end, click 'Inspect' and look for the 'name' value. You'll find the attribute code wrapped in square brackets, for example taxvat in name="account[taxvat]", which refers to the 'Tax/VAT Number' field in the customer account. By combining the object 'customer' with the attribute code 'taxvat', you'll get the variable {{var customer.getTaxvat()}}.

Select Default Value for Option Fields

It's now also possible to configure a default value for the form components in the 'Options' tab, which includes a dropdown menu, list box, radios and checkboxes.

When entering the options list for any of these form components in the form builder, simply add a * in front of a specific option to make it the default/preselected value, such as the *5 stars rating in the example on the right.

Customize Form Components Using a CSS Style Sheet

The addition of the Custom CSS Class(es) enables you to fully customize individual form components using CSS style sheets. In the example to the right, the class 'rating-options' can be added to a style sheet to adjust the design of the inline radio buttons, for example:

.rating-options {
color: blue;
text-align: center;
font-style: italic;
}

Please note that if you have updated an older version of Magento Custom Contact Forms, you'll need to re-add existing form fields to show the new Custom CSS Class field, as well as the Default Value field discussed above.

The latest release of our Search Autocomplete extension for Magento comes with several handy new front-end display options. Version 1.4.0 now includes two search result grid layouts, optional search query highlighting and the possibility to adjust the search results dropdown menu width. Read all about the new features below or check out our Search Autocomplete product page for more information!

Multi-column Product Suggestion Grid Layouts

Besides showing your product suggestions in a list format, our Search Autocomplete plugin now also provides you with two grid designs for displaying search results in your Magento web shop. The 2 and 3 column grid layouts are especially useful for generating search suggestions with an extra focus on the product images.

By defining the maximum amount of displayed product, category and CMS page suggestions, you can easily adjust the amount of rows shown in the grid layouts. For example, if you'd like to use a 3 column grid layout with 2 rows of products, the preferred product limit would be 6.

Adjustable Search Results Dropdown Width

Using the 'Search results dropdown width' option you can easily adjust the width percentage of the dropdown menu in relation to the search field width and make the menu as narrow or wide as you prefer. In the image below the dropdown width percentage of the single column list layout and 2 to 3 column grid layouts has been set to 100%, 150% and 200% respectively.

By increasing the dropdown width percentage of the grid layouts, the size of the product images is automatically increased as well. To preserve the image quality you might have to increase the resolution by adjusting the thumbnail image size in the extension's config screen, which by default is set to 200(px) for the 3 column grid layout. If you're using the single column list layout on the other hand, the thumbnail image size represents the actual image size in pixels used in the search results dropdown menu.

Optional Search Query Highlighting

With the new search query highlighting option our Magento extension can automatically underline and emphasize queries in the search results dropdown text. By enabling this feature your customers will notice the most relevant product suggestions in your list or multi-column grid layout at a glance!

In the past few months we have received several inquiries from customers asking how to create dynamic contact forms for Magento, meaning forms with dependent fields that only appear on the front-end under certain conditions. The condition on which a dependent form field should be shown could be a certain value in form field X or a selected option in form field Y.

At Plugin Company we immediately agreed that a dynamic contact form functionality would be a great addition to our Custom Contact Forms extension for Magento, which enables users to create advanced contact forms with its simple drag & drop form builder. That's why we recently added the conditional form fields feature to our extension, which lets you make any of the custom contact form fields dependent, without any coding skills required!

This article will explain how to easily create a dynamic contact form with conditional form fields using our Magento extension. It uses the conditional contact form example from our Custom Contact Forms live demo, which you should definitely check out if you'd like to personally experience our extension's ease of use!

Creating a Custom Contact Form for Magento

In our first contact form tutorial we have already explained in detail how to create a custom contact form using our Magento extension, so in this article we'll suffice with summarizing the steps below.

To create a new contact form, navigate to CMS > Contact Forms > Manage Contact Forms in the top Admin Panel Menu and click the 'Add Form' button. This will open the Form Settings tab, where you can configure the general settings of the form, including the form name and front-end URL settings. Besides that you can choose to save the form submissions in the back-end, allowing you to export submitted form data to CSV or Excel.

If you choose to automatically create a front-end page for the contact form, you can find the form URL(s) in the bottom section of the Form Settings tab after saving the contact form. These can be used as quick-view links to check the changes made to your contact form on the front-end.

Now open the Form Builder tab to build up your form by simply dragging and dropping the desired form components into the Contact Form area. For our dynamic contact form example we have created a form that includes various input and selection fields enabling customers to select their account type, preferred contact method and enter additional question details:

This is what the custom contact form example above would look like on the front-end, using the Cerulean theme in combination with the Well wrapper (you can find more information about configuring the contact form front-end style here):

Because some form fields are only relevant under certain conditions, we will make them appear dynamically on the front-end by configuring conditional form fields in the next step.

Before saving the contact form, make sure that each form field has a unique ID, which can be entered when customizing the form components. This is not only important for setting up conditional form fields, but also to correctly display contact form submissions in the back-end and in the customer/admin e-mail notifications.

Creating Conditional Form Fields

After saving your custom contact form, open the Conditional Form Fields tab to make any of the added form fields dependent. Select the field you would like to display dynamically from the drop-down menu, which shows all fields included in the contact form sorted by their ID, then click 'Add Field'.

* The values wrapped in brackets below are the form field IDs used in our example form. The descriptions in bold are the label texts of the form fields.

In this case we will make the Account type [account-type] drop-down menu conditional, which includes the options 'Private Sales Member', 'Retailer' and 'Wholesale'. We only want to show this field under the condition that 'Yes' is selected from the I have an account [account] radio buttons.

Click the 'Add condition' button to add a new form field condition. Now you can select the form field and its values that are required to display the conditional form field, in this example the form field with ID 'account' that equals the value 'Yes'.

You can add as many conditions per form field as you want by clicking 'Add conditions' and create more conditional form fields with the 'Add Field' button. Following the same method as described above, we will make the following form fields conditional as well:

The Phone number [phone-number] input field should be shown on condition that at least the option 'Phone' is selected from the Contact me by [contact-method] check-boxes. Because check-boxes allow multiple selections, the Phone number input field will also appear if both 'Phone' AND 'E-mail' are selected on the front-end.

The Subject [subject] drop-down menu should be shown on condition that 'Customer Service' is selected from the Question for [department] drop-down. This means that if 'Sales' is selected instead of 'Customer Service', the Subject drop-down won't be displayed on the front-end.

The Order number [order-number] input field should be shown on condition that at least one of the following values are selected from the Subject [subject] drop-down: 'Billing', 'Shipping & Delivery' or 'Warranty & Returns'. Because the Subject field is a list box, multiple selection are possible and any combination of the fore-mentioned options will trigger the Order number field.

The Order date [order-date] picker should be shown on condition that at least 'Shipping & Delivery' is selected from the Subject [subject] drop-down.

The RMA number [rma] input field should be shown on condition that at least 'Warranty & Returns' is selected from the Subject [subject] drop-down.

The full set of conditional form fields listed above would look like this when configured in the Magento Admin Panel:

Besides the conditions exemplified above that are configured to equal a specific value or include at least one of the listed values, it's also possible to create conditions that DON'T equal a specific value, include ALL of the listed values or that match a specific regular expression.

When the dependent form field is a selection field, such as radio buttons, check-boxes, a drop-down menu or a list box, the conditional values can be selected from the drop-down menu on the right. With regular input fields you can manually enter conditional value(s) as a text.

Using Dynamic Contact Forms in Magento

After adding the conditional fields to our example contact form above, it will look like this on the front-end when opening the contact form page:

The contact form will dynamically show the conditional form fields depending on the customer's input. The example submission below is completed in a way to show all conditional fields, which are Account Type, Phone Number, Subject, Order Number and RMA Number:

Summary

This article has shown how easy it is to create conditional forms for Magento using our Custom Contact Forms extension, which shows dependent form fields dynamically based on the customer's input.

The conditional form used in this tutorial is just a simple example showcasing some of the possibilities for creating your own dynamic contact form for Magento. Don't forget to check out our Magento Custom Contact Forms live demo if you'd like to build your own conditional form or view the example form in our demo store!

You can also find our extension on Magento Connect and read more about its functionalities in our Custom Contact Forms blog posts below.

From Our Blog

• Customizing the Magento Contact Form, Part 1: Content & Design
• Customizing the Magento Contact Form, Part 2: E-mail Notifications
• Customizing the Magento Contact Form, Part 3: Front-end Display
• 10 Great Custom Contact Form Examples for Magento

Our Automatic Customer Group Switching extension provides Magento merchants with an excellent solution to automate their customer group management. Based on a super flexible rule system similar to Magento's Shopping Cart Price Rules, our extension offers endless possibilities for setting up your own custom group switching rules.

Create Super Flexible Customer Group Switching Rules

Each group switching rule supports an unlimited amount of rule conditions based on which customers are automatically moved from and to any designated customer group. The extensive list of rule conditions includes various customer details, order and invoice totals, shipping and billing address, single order attributes, product attributes and recurring profile support.

Besides that our Magento extension comes with several other features that can help you to create group switching rules customized to your own specific requirements:

For each rule you can select the applicable order and invoice statuses, such as 'complete', 'pending' or 'paid'. You can set a date range during which the rule should be executed and select the events on which the rule should be processed, for example when an order or invoice is created or saved, or when a customer logs in to his account. On top that you can define the processing priority in case there are multiple overlapping customer group switching rules and choose to stop further processing after a specific rule.

Automatically Switch Customer Groups with Endless Possibilities

This article sets out 10 useful Automatic Customer Group Switching rule examples which can be used to automate your Magento customer group management. If you'd like to know more about setting up your own custom group switching rules, be sure to check out the extension's user manual or feel free to create a rule yourself in our demo store!

1. Customer Account Age

One of the various rule conditions referring to customer account information is account age in days, which can be used to set up automatic group switching rules for recurring customers. This way you can reward loyal clients by moving them to a trusted group or by making them a VIP member.

Besides that it's also possible to create rules based on the customer account creation date.

2. Newsletter Subscription

A commonly used group switching rule is based on active newsletter subscriptions. For example, when a customer subscribes to your newsletter, you can automatically add them to a special newsletter discount group, which in turn can be used to increase your newsletter subscribers count.

3. Customer E-mail Address

A relatively new addition to the rule conditions enables you to group customers based on their e-mail address. If an e-mail address contains a certain value, for example the suffix '.edu', they are automatically moved to a specified group such as 'Educational Institutions'.

4. Customer Gender & Age

Besides the above mentioned group switching rule examples based on customer account information, it's also possible to set up rules based on customer attributes such as gender, date of birth and age in years.

These customer attribute conditions can be used to aim your newsletters or promotions at a specific target group, for example female customers in their twenties and thirties.

5. Shipping & Billing Address

Grouping customers by their default billing or shipping address is a common practice in eCommerce businesses. Using our Magento Customer Group Switching extension you can save yourself a lot of time and automatically group your customers by city, postcode, state, province or country!

6. Total Turnover

Automatic Customer Group Switching for Magento provides you with many options to set up rules based on aggregated sales attributes, including order and invoice subtotals, grand totals, total shipping costs, total items or total weight.

This enables you to group customers that generate a certain monthly turnover or move clients to a special shipping rate group based on their total order weight or shipping costs, just to name a few examples.

7. Single Order Attributes

Besides setting up group switching rules based on the customer's entire order history, our extension also makes it possible to switch customer groups based on any single order attribute.

There are many order attribute conditions to choose from, such as order turnover, shipping costs, shipping method, item quantity, weight, shipping or billing address, order ID, VAT number, currency and coupon codes. By combining these conditions you can set up virtually any group switching rule you can think of!

8. Ordered Products

Magento Automatic Customer Group Switching lets you set up rules based on any product attribute combination of the customer's order history, including product turnover, ordered quantity, SKU, category, type and price.

This way you could group customers that have generated a specific product turnover or have ordered an certain amount of product X, either looking at their entire order history or newly placed orders only.

9. Membership Products

Because our extension enables you to set up group switching rules based on ordered product attributes, it provides a perfect solution for managing customers with membership products in Magento.

Let's say you're selling monthly membership products and you want to automatically switch customer groups based on active memberships. Simply create a rule for moving customers to an active membership group on condition that the membership product is found in the order history of the last 30 days and it will be automatically done for you!

In the same way you can create an additional rule to switch clients back to their original customer group once their membership has expired.

10. Recurring Profiles

Magento Automatic Customer Group Switching also supports rules based on recurring PayPal profiles. This allows you to easily manage customers by their recurring profile state in combination with ordered product SKU or quantity.

Summary

This article has illustrated just a few simple customer group switching examples that can be created using our Magento extension. By setting up as many rules as you want any combining any of the provided group switching conditions, the possibilities for automating your customer group management in Magento are limitless.

Check out our Automatic Customer Group Switching extension page for more information, screenshots and customer reviews or visit our product page on Magento Connect!

Custom Contact Forms for Magento allows you to create an unlimited amount of custom forms, each supporting an unlimited amount of custom input fields. This articles sets out 10 great ways to use contact forms in your Magento web shop, showcasing just a few of the many design and display options that are included in our extension.

1. General Contact Form

Practically every web shop needs a general contact form, enabling (potential) customers to ask for additional information. Magento comes with a simple built-in contact form, which unfortunately cannot be easily customized or moved from its default position (examplestore.com/contacts).

Our Custom Contact Forms extension is great to spice up your default contact form, enabling you to insert additional input fields if necessary and choose from a variety of beautiful front-end themes.

Besides that you can insert the form anywhere in your Magento store using our custom contact form widget, for example in a CMS page or block, in a sidebar with pop-up form functionality, or as a fancy slide-out form as exemplified on the right!

2. Customer Service Form

The default Magento contact form is only suitable for simple contact requests. When creating a custom contact form specifically aimed at customer service requests, you can insert additional input fields like order number, product name, contact preferences, etc.

In this way you will directly receive all the details needed to answer service request accordingly, helping you to provide the best possible customer support!

The example on the right shows our sidebar contact form widget with pop-up contact form.

3. Customer Satisfaction Survey

One of the most important things to keep in mind when running a successful e-commerce business is to frequently measure your customer satisfaction level.

Using our Magento extension you can easily create a satisfaction survey to ask for your customers' opinion about your products or services.

You could add a contact form link to your order confirmation e-mails to increase the amount of submitted customer satisfaction surveys.

Besides that you can choose to save form submissions in your Magento Admin Panel, from where you can export the submitted data to CSV or Excel for further analysis.

4. Product Questions Form

Using our custom contact form widget you can add a product questions form to your product pages, making it easier for customers to ask questions about a specific product without having to navigate to a separate contact form page.

Because the admin notification includes the URL on which the contact form was submitted, the admin can instantly see to which product the client is referring.

5. RMA Form

A faulty product can give both you and your customer a headache. Why not make the replacement or refund process easier for both parties by creating a full-fledged RMA form?

By adding custom input fields for all necessary details to process the warranty claim as smoothly as possible, you will save yourself and your customer a lot of time and worries.

You can even add an upload component to your RMA form so your customers can attach files such as pictures of the defective product!

6. Suggestion Form

It's always good to keep a finger on the pulse regarding the usability of your website, products or services. Creating a simple suggestion form is a great way to you give your customers the opportunity to share their ideas and tips with you!

If customers can't find a specific product in your store you can encourage them to contact you by creating a product request form. It provides you with new possibilities to extend your product range, or you can adjust product descriptions to make your goods easier to find.

7. Request for Quotation Form

Are you offering custom products or services on your website that don't have a fixed price? Create a request for quotation form enabling your customers to send you all necessary information to provide them with an accurate quote.

By adding selection fields such as drop-down menus, radios or check-boxes to the form, you can automatically include all relevant pricing options for your customer to choose from.

8. Best Price Guarantee Form

A best price guarantee form adds great credibility to e-commerce businesses offering products or services at competitive rates.

If customers find an equivalent offer at a lower price elsewhere, you can promote your company's service by enabling them to submit a claim with the competitive offer details.

Besides providing your customers with extra support, the form has the additional benefit of giving you insight in your competitor's pricing behavior!

9. Dealership Inquiry Form

For wholesalers or distributors aiming to expand their dealer network, a dealership inquiry form is a great way to facilitate online applications for potential B2B customers.

By creating a custom contact form you can directly gather all required information to assess the dealership application.

10. Job Application Form

When offering jobs on your website you can facilitate the application process by creating a custom job application form.

Add a file upload component so potential employees can directly send you their CV or any other required documents.

If you need a more extensive application form, you can easily divide it into multiple sections by creating a multi-page contact form as exemplified on the right!

Summary

This article has demonstrated a few commonly used contact form examples that can be created using our Custom Contact Forms extension for Magento. Don't forget to try our Custom Contact Forms demo if you'd like to personally experience the extension's ease of use. Or check out the tutorials below if you want to know more about creating your own contact forms for Magento!

From our blog:

• Customizing the Magento contact form, part 1: content & design
• Customizing the Magento contact form, part 2: e-mail notifications
• Customizing the Magento contact form, part 3: front-end display

Find similar free tutorials an E-book. Visit our SlideShare Channel

In the previous two articles about customizing the Magento contact form we talked about changing the form content and design and setting up customer and admin e-mail notifications. This time we will discuss several front-end display options, starting with how to insert Magento's default form in a CMS page.

Besides that this article will show how to easily add one or multiple custom forms to your Magento store using our Custom Contact Forms extension, either by automatically creating a new contact form page or embedding a form in any CMS page or block. On top of that we will demonstrate two cool front-end display features included our extension: the pop-up form and slide-out contact form!

Inserting the Default Magento Contact Form in a CMS Page

Magento's built-in contact form is by default located at www.yourstoredomain.com/contacts. This form isn't part of any CMS page and unfortunately cannot be easily customized in the back-end. There is however a simple way to insert this default contact form in any CMS page.

Navigate to CMS > Pages in the top Admin Panel menu, select or create a new page and simply paste the following mark-up on the desired position in the CMS page content:

<!– CONTACT FORM –>
{{{block type="core/template" name="contactForm" form_action="/contacts/index/post" template="contacts/form.phtml"}}}
<!– END OF CONTACT FORM –>

Note: The mark-up has been wrapped in an extra pair of brackets in order to display it as text in this article. You will need to remove one pair { } when copying the lines into your CMS page!

In the example below the mark-up has been added to Magento's default customer service page. In order to further customize this form's content or style you'll need to manually edit the form.phtml file and corresponding CSS stylesheet.

Inserting Custom Contact Forms in Magento

When you are using our Custom Contact Forms extension there are several front-end display options to choose from, all enabling you to easily insert your custom forms anywhere in your Magento store.

You can add your form to an automatically generated front-end page or insert it in CMS pages, blocks and layout templates using our custom contact form widgets. Furthermore, these widgets also enable you to create a sidebar block with a pop-up contact form functionality, or you can display a fancy slide-out form in your store as demonstrated in the next chapters.

Creating a New Contact Form Page

When creating a contact form with our Magento extension, you can choose to add it to an automatically created front-end page, such as exemplified below:

You can enter a custom URL key for each form and set a default URL prefix and suffix in the extension's config screen, following this structure: http://www.examplestore.com/{prefix}/{urlkey}{suffix}.

If you want to use multiple contact forms in your Magento store, this provides an excellent solution for organizing your contact pages, for example:

http://www.examplestore.com/contacts/customer-support.html
http://www.examplestore.com/contacts/sales.html
http://www.examplestore.com/contacts/satisfaction-survey.html

Embedding Contact Forms in CMS Pages & Blocks

If you prefer to add a contact form to an existing CMS page or block, you can easily achieve this by using our extension's custom contact form widgets.

Simply click the 'Insert Widget' button above the CMS content editor, set the widget type to 'Custom Contact Form' and select the form you want to insert in the CMS page or block.

A small piece of code will be added to the CMS content, which you can place on any desired position in your CMS page or block. Any changes made to your custom contact forms will be automatically updated in the contact form widgets too.

In the example above we have embedded a custom contact form in Magento's default 'About Us' page, with the following front-end result:

Creating a Pop-up Contact Form

The custom contact form widget can also be configured to display your form in a slick lightbox pop-up by placing a contact link or button anywhere in your Magento store. This chapter will show how to create a pop-up form sidebar block and place it in the demo store's right column.

Navigate to CMS > Widgets in the top Admin Panel menu to create a new widget instance and select the widget type 'Custom Contact Form'. Scroll down to the 'Layout Updates' section in the Front-end Properties tab and choose where you want to display the widget, in our example on all store pages with a right column:

Select a custom form in the Widget Options tab and enable the 'Display as pop-up' option. Now you can configure the pop-up button or link settings and optionally create a new sidebar block including a custom title and text:

Using the widget settings above, this is what the sidebar block will look like in the front-end demo store, with the contact form showing in a slick light-box pop-up:

Creating a Slide-out Contact Form

Our Custom Contact Forms extension also includes a special slide-out form widget, adding a button on the left, right, bottom-left or bottom-right side of your Magento store, from where your contact form appears when clicked on. The slide-out form is a great way to spice-up your website, enabling your customers to contact you at any time while browsing through your store!

To create a slide-out contact form, select the widget type 'Custom Contact Form Slide-Out', choose a custom form in the Widget Options tab and configure its slide-out settings:

If the 'Widget button text' is left empty, the slide-out button will show a simple envelope icon as in the front-end example below:

Summary

The last part of our Magento contact form tutorial has pointed out various ways of embedding forms in your Magento webshop. As already noted before, the options when using Magento's default contact form are quite limited if you don't have any coding experience.

That's why our Magento Custom Contact Forms extension provides a great solution for anyone looking for an easy way to create fully customized contact forms and display them anywhere in their front-end store!

Want to know more about our feature-rich contact form extension? Read all about it on our Magento Custom Contact Forms product page or on Magento Connect!

From Our Blog

• Customizing the Magento Contact Form, Part 1: Content & Design
• Customizing the Magento Contact Form, Part 2: E-mail Notifications
• 10 Great Custom Contact Form Examples for Magento
• Creating a Dynamic Contact Form for Magento

In our previous tutorial we have talked about customizing the Magento contact form content and design, either by manually adding a new input field to the default form's core file, or by replacing it with a fully customized form created with our Magento Custom Contact Form extension.

This article will explain how to configure the Magento contact form e-mail notification by creating a new transactional e-mail template or by using our extension's built-in e-mail notification system for customers and admin users.

Creating a Contact Form Transactional E-mail Template

In part 1 of our Magento contact form tutorial we showed how to edit the default contact form by adding a new Subject input field between the Telephone and Comment fields. This doesn't mean the submitted data entered in this field will be automatically included in your e-mail notification: you will need to create a new transactional e-mail template for this.

To create a new e-mail template, navigate to System > Transactional Emails in Magento's top Admin Panel menu and click the 'Add New Template' button.

In the top section select 'Contact Form' from the Template drop-down menu and click 'Load Template'. The default contact form e-mail template will be loaded in the Template Information section, where you'll need to enter a template name and subject.

Submitted form data is added to the e-mail notification by inserting variables into the template content for each form field. For example, the variable {{var data.name}} will show the sumitted data of the input field with id="name". In order to include the Subject input field data in the e-mail, you will need to add a new variable in the template content with the form field's ID, which in our example was id="subject".

After saving the new transactional e-mail template, you still need to assign it to the store contact by navigating to System > Configuration > Contacts. Select your custom e-mail template in the Email Options section, click 'Save Config' and you should be all set.

Configuring Custom Contact Forms E-mail Notifications

The previous contact form tutorial has explained how you can easily create fully customized contact forms using our Custom Contact Forms extension. Another great feature of our Magento extension is that it comes with a full-fledged e-mail notification system to notify your customers and admin users when a new contact request has been submitted.

You can use the default e-mail notification settings for all your custom contact forms or configure the customer and admin notifications for each form separately as further explained below.

Setting up Customer & Admin E-mail Notifications

To configure the e-mail notification of a custom contact form, navigate to CMS > Contact Forms > Manage Contact Forms in the top Admin Panel menu. Select an existing form from the overview or click the 'Add Form' button to create a new form. The e-mail notifications can be configured in the Customer Notification and Admin Notification tabs of the Form menu.

For both the customer and admin notification you can configure the recipient and sender details, optional BCC recipients and the notification subject. If you leave these fields empty, the default settings will be used which can be entered in the extension's configuration screen.

The notification content of each contact form can by fully customized at the bottom of the Customer/Admin Notification tab either by using the default content editor or the WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to add widgets, images and variables to your e-mail notifications.

Besides the standard Magento variables, the customer and admin e-mail notification also support the use of custom variables, which we'll talk about in the last chapter.

Configuring Conditional Admin Notification Recipients

A new option added to the Admin Notification tab in Custom Contact Forms v1.4.0 enables you to configure conditional admin notification recipients based on submitted form data. In this way you can send a copy of the admin notification to e-mail addresses on condition that a specific form field value is submitted.

To configure the conditional admin recipients, you need to enter the form field ID and the required value from that form field, followed by the e-mail address that should receive the notification based on the specified value.

In the example below the ID 'department' refers to a 'Question for' drop-down menu including the options Sales, Support and Customer Service. Depending on the department selected from that drop-down menu, the admin notification e-mail will be send to the corresponding e-mail address.

Adding Custom Variables to E-mail Notifications

A handy feature of the Custom Contact Forms e-mail notifications is that all admin fields support the use of custom variables, allowing you to easily add submitted form data to your customer and admin notifications.

When creating a contact form using our form builder, you can configure the content and settings of each form component in a pop-over. The unique ID which needs to be assigned to each form component of your contact form can be used as a custom variable by simply inserting the ID wrapped in brackets in the e-mail notification content.

Looking at the example form above, you'll see that the ID 'subject' is assigned to the Subject input field. By inserting {subject} in your e-mail notification content, the submitted form data of this input field will be automatically added to the customer and/or admin e-mail notifications.

In the customer notification below the variable {name} refers to the Name input field, {department} to the Question For drop-down menu and {contact-method} to the Contact Me By radio buttons. If you want to automatically show all submitted form data in your e-mail notification, you can simply use the custom variable {submission_overview}.

The variables starting with 'store' in the example below are standard Magento variables, which can be used to add your default store information to the e-mail notifications.

The custom variables can also be used in the other e-mail notification fields. For example, by inserting the variable {email} in the 'Reply to e-mail' field in the Admin Notification tab, admins can directly reply to the customer without having to copy-paste their e-mail address from the e-mail notification first.

Summary

This article has explained how to configure the transactional e-mail template for Magento's default contact form and how to create custom e-mail notifications for customers and admins using our Magento Custom Contact Forms extension.

The benefit of using our extension is that you can fully customize the customer and admin e-mails for each of your contact forms and easily include custom variables in your e-mail notifications, while the options with transactional e-mails are obviously much more limited.

Want to know more about our Magento contact form extension? Check our Custom Contact Forms extension page or visit our Magento Connect page!

From Our Blog

• Customizing the Magento Contact Form, Part 1: Content & Design
• Customizing the Magento Contact Form, Part 3: Front-end Display
• 10 Great Custom Contact Form Examples for Magento
• Creating a Dynamic Contact Form for Magento