Joomla! Documentation™

Description

Contacts allow you to list people and their personal information on your web site, not necessarily registered users. You may also allow anyone, or just registered users, to send e-mails to those people. The Edit Form is where you add a new Contact or edit an existing Contact.

Be aware: If a contact has a menu item then the Contact Menu Settings override some settings available here. Be careful not to disclose personal information by mistake!

How to Access

• Select Components → Contacts → Contacts in the Administrator menu. Then...
• To Add a new Contact:
  • Select the New button in the Toolbar.
• To Edit an existing Contact:
  • Select a contact title in the Title column.

Screenshot

Form Fields

In this section, you can enter information about the Contact, such as name, address, e-mail, and so on. The options allow you to control settings such as what information gets displayed for each Contact.

• Name. The full name of the Contact.

• Alias. The internal name of the item. Normally, you can leave this blank and Joomla will fill in a default value Title in lower case and with dashes instead of spaces. Learn more.

Edit Contact

Here you enter the basic information about the contact.

• Linked User. Select the User, if any, that this Contact is linked to from the drop-down list box. This allows you to link this Contact's information to a registered Joomla! User. If this Contact is not linked to a User, select "-No User-".
• Image. Image to display for this Contact. Select an image file from the drop-down list box. This lists images in the 'images/stories' folder. Images can be uploaded using the Media Manager.
• Position: The Contact's current position.
• E-mail. The Contact's e-mail address. Note that e-mail addresses in Joomla! can be protected from "spambots" by enabling "Content-Email Cloaking" in the Plug-in Manager. This is enabled by default.
• Address. The Contact's street address.
• City or Suburb. The Contact's town or suburb.
• State or Province. The Contact's state or county.
• Postal / ZIP Code. The Contact's postal code.
• Country. The Contact's country.
• Telephone. The Contact's phone number.
• Mobile. The Contact's mobile phone number.
• Fax. The Contact's fax number.
• Website. The Contact's web site address.
• Sort Fields. To enable sort fields for Category lists go to the Contacts → Options screen and set List Layouts → Sort By to Sort Name. Then you need to use real words for sorting. For example, set First Sort Field to Doe, second field to John for the first contact; then First Sort Field to Doe, second field to Jane for the second contact. The third field is not used in this case. The sort fields are character fields so if you want to sort by age you need to enter 0x for ages under 10, so 08 for example.
  • First Sort Field. The name to use as the first sort field.
  • Second Sort Field. The name to use as the second sort field.
  • Third Sort Field. The name to use as the third sort field.

• Status: Published status of the item. Possible values are:
  • Published: The item is published. This is the only state that will allow regular website users to view this item.
  • Unpublished: The item is unpublished.
  • Archived: The item has been archived.
  • Trashed: The item has been sent to the Trash.

• Category. The Category this item belongs to.

• Featured. Whether or not the item will be displayed in featured view.

• Access. The viewing Access Level for this item.

• Language. Item language.

• Tags. Enter one or more optional tags for this item. You can select existing tags by entering in the first few letters. You may also create new tags by entering them here. Tags allow you to see lists of related items across content types (for example, articles, contacts, and categories).

• Version Note. Optional field to identify this version of the item in the item's Version History window.

Miscellaneous Information

Other information about this Contact can be entered using the editor.

Display

• Show Category. Show or hide the Contact's category.
• Show Contact List. Show or hide the Contact list.
• Display format. Determines the style used to display sections of the contact form.

• Tags. Whether to hide or show any tags for this item.
• Contact Information. Hide or Show the Contact information.
• Miscellaneous Information. Hide or Show the Miscellaneous information.
• vCard. Hide or Show the vCard link for this Contact.
• Show User Articles. If this contact is mapped to a user, and if this is set to Show, then a list of articles created by this user will show.
• # Articles to List. Number of articles to list.
• User Profile. If this contact is mapped to a user, and if this is set to Show, then the profile of this user will show.
• Show User Custom Field Groups. Show user custom fields which belong to all or only selected field groups.
• Contact Links. Show or hide the contact links.
• Link A Label. Label for an additional link for this contact.
• Link A URL. The additional link URL for this contact.
• Link B Label. Label for an additional link for this contact.
• Link B URL. The additional link URL for this contact.
• Link C Label. Label for an additional link for this contact.
• Link C URL. The additional link URL for this contact.
• Link D Label. Label for an additional link for this contact.
• Link D URL. The additional link URL for this contact.
• Link E Label. Label for an additional link for this contact.
• Link E URL. The additional link URL for this contact.
• Layout. Use a different layout from the supplied component view or overrides in the templates.

Form

• Contact Form. Hide or Show the E-mail form. If Show is selected, a form is displayed that allows the user to send an e-mail to the Contact from the web site.
• Send Copy to Submitter. Hide or Show the checkbox: 'E-mail a copy of this message to your own address.'
• Session Check. Check for the existence of session cookie. This means that users without cookies enabled will not be able to send emails.
• Custom Reply. Turns off the automated reply, allowing for Plugins to handle integration with other systems.
• Contact Redirect. Enter an alternative url, where user will be redirected to after the mail is sent.

Publishing

• Start Publishing. Date and time to start publishing. Use this field if you want to enter content ahead of time and then have it published automatically at a future time.

• Finish Publishing. Date and time to finish publishing. Use this field if you want to have content automatically changed to Unpublished state at a future time (for example, when it is no longer applicable).

• Created Date. This field defaults to the current time when the Article was created. You can enter in a different date and time or click on the calendar icon to find the desired date.

• Created By. Name of the Joomla User who created this item. This will default to the currently logged-in user. If you want to change this to a different user, click the Select User button to select a different user.

• Created by Alias. This optional field allows you to enter in an alias for this Author for this Article. This allows you to display a different Author name for this Article.

• Modified Date. Date of last modification.

• Modified By. Username who performed the last modification.

• Revision. Number of revisions to this item.

• Hits. The number of times an item has been viewed.

• ID. This is a unique identification number for this item assigned automatically by Joomla. It is used to identify the item internally, and you cannot change this number. When creating a new item, this field displays "0" until you save the new entry, at which point a new ID is assigned to it.

• Meta Description. An optional paragraph to be used as the description of the page in the HTML output. This will generally display in the results of search engines. If entered, this creates an HTML meta element with a name attribute of 'description' and a content attribute equal to the entered text.

• Keywords. Optional entry for keywords. Must be entered separated by commas (for example, "cats, dogs, pets") and may be entered in upper or lower case. (For example, "CATS" will match "cats" or "Cats"). Keywords can be used in several ways:
  1. To help Search Engines and other systems classify the content of the Article.
  2. In combination with Banner tags, to display specific Banners based on the Article content. For example, say you have one Banner with an ad for dog products and another Banner for cat products. You can have your dog Banner display when a User is viewing a dog-related Article and your cat Banner display for a cat-related Article. To do this, you would:
     • Add the keywords "dog" and "cat" to the appropriate Articles.
     • Add the Tags "dog" and "cat" to the appropriate Banners in Banners: Edit.
     • Set the Banner module Parameter 'Search By Tags' to "Yes" in Site Modules: Banners.
  3. For articles only, in combination with the 'Articles - Related' module, to display Articles that share at least one keyword in common. For example, if the current Article displayed has the keywords "cats, dogs, monkeys", any other Articles with at least one of these keywords will show in the 'Articles - Related' module.

• Robots. The instructions for web 'robots' that browse to this page.
  • index, follow: Index this page and follow the links on this page.
  • noindex, follow: Do not index this page, but still follow the links on the page. For example, you might do this for a site map page where you want the links to be indexed but you don't want this page to show in search engines.
  • index, nofollow: Index this page, but do not follow any links on the page. For example, you might want to do this for an events calendar, where you want the page to show in search engines but you do not want to index each event.
  • noindex, nofollow: Do not index this page or follow any links on the page.
  • Use Global: Set in Global Configuration: Metadata Settings.

• Content Rights. Describe what rights others have to use this content.

Associations

Toolbar

At the top of the page you will see the toolbar shown in the Screenshot above. The functions are:

• Save. Saves the item and stays in the current screen.

• Save & Close. Saves the item and closes the current screen.

• Save & New. Saves the item and keeps the editing screen open and ready to create another item.

• Save as Copy. Saves your changes to a copy of the current item. Does not affect the current item. This toolbar icon is not shown if you are creating a new item.

• Cancel. Closes the current screen and returns to the previous screen without saving any modifications you may have made.

• Close. Closes the current screen and returns to the previous screen without saving any modifications you may have made. This toolbar icon is not shown if you are creating a new item.

• Versions. Opens the Item Version History window to show any prior versions of this item. This allows you to view older versions of this item and, if desired, restore from an older version. See Version History for more information.

• Associations. With a specific language set for an item, allows side by side editing in another language. This toolbar icon is shown on Multilingual Sites only.

• Help. Opens this help screen.

Quick Tips

At least one Contact Category must be added before adding the first Contact.

Related Information

Related Help Screens	Description
Contacts: Categories	The Contact Category Manager is where you can edit existing Contact Categories and create new ones. Note that Contact Categories are separate from other Categories, such as for Articles, Banners, News Feeds, and Web Links. From this screen, you can also navigate to theContact Manager: Contacts screen.
Contacts: Edit Category	This is where you can add a Contact Category or edit an existing Contact Category. Contact Categories allow you to organize contacts in your web site. Contact Categories are separate from other types of Categories, such as those for Articles, Banners, News Feeds, and so on.
Contacts	The Contact Manager screen allows you to add contact information to your Joomla! site. You can enter information such as name, address, phone and e-mail. You can also link contacts to registered users. Afterwards, you can use the Menu Manager to create front-end links to the the contacts.