multiple email 'post' methods possible with perch3 contact form?

  • The website I am working on has a contact page that connects to a number of different persons (the current site exposes individual emails and telephone numbers). Is it possible, using the Perch forms addon to explicitly connect a separate email path for each individual? At the moment, I can provide unique ids for each email contact, but I can't separate these in the control panel section of the site in order to have each contact email directed to each contact. The documentation talks about using 'separate scripting' in connection with forms and adding 'action' to the form but I'm looking for advice on how best to create a contact page using the specific criteria I face. This is a church website with at least 12 individual contact emails and a desire to have each contact have it's own email contact form/action.

  • drewm

    Approved the thread.
  • Hey,


    So just to understand things, you have one form, where the user can select the contact they want to send the submission to? You're looking to then send an email to the relevant contact based upon the users input?


    Can you provide a step by step use case in how you need it to work and I'll do my best to help!

  • The original website has a contact page with this content:

    https://www.firstunitarianottawa.ca/staff-directory.html


    which is to say: many different email contacts for each member of the organization. The question is: can I create a separate contact form for each of the individual members of organization which will then be receivable inside of their individual email accounts -- using the Perch contact form addon. I'm guessing, if this is at all possible, it is complicated.

  • I've created several forms for contacting each member of the client organization individually, including a 'tester' form. Every field id is unique and related to the contact form for the individual member. When I fill in the fields on the tester form, all the fields in all the other forms are also filled with exact same info. This would seem to indicate that creating forms with unique field ids is not the solution. The page can default back to replicate the current contact page on current site... but, if Perch CMS can handle this scenario as a group of contact forms, that would be preferable to our intent.


    Any other ideas would be welcome... Thanks in advance.

  • They are unique. Here is a sample for one of the contacts. Action of form is difficult to understand and I'm still not sure about what I'm seeing. I don't know whether Perch is able to handle this type of query... multiple individual forms. Right now, I'm in a local development and can't really test the email forwarding setting. If this is something Perch should be able to handle, I'll try to place on the staging site but, currently behaviour is somewhat odd: multiple duplicate messages for each form. I don't know whether I'm missing something on how Perch handles contact querying...

  • DEMO site does not seem to be working at the moment.


    I'm trying to give a client an overview of Perch and, short of building out the entire interface, I need some information that they would find useful. I've tried searching online for reviews of Perch CMS and they aren't very numerous. I also am facing a lot of resistance from client org by individuals who think that Perch can't be a rigorous enough CMS because it doesn't have the street cred of Wordpress or Drupal. I hate code bloat and that's why I like Perch and the use-case here will probably be a blog-type application with facilitated commenting: but how to convince the lay user that Perch is able?


    Any suggestions?

  • I hate code bloat and that's why I like Perch

    Have you made a site with Perch before? If you try, you can make a bloated whale with Perch. Your frontend is up to you.


    If you're looking for 5 star reviews of Perch, mid-way through asking for help on contact forms... that could be a red flag.


    Or just build the demo site. Stay up late a few nights in a row. Just do it! Then you can write your own review of Perch.


    If you want super-flexible form submission control, maybe use an external service such as JotForm, then embed on your site. These services are not always free, and come with some bloat and performance loss compared with native forms, but have handy form builders and conditional logic widgets and other cool features. They make it easy to send data on to other systems like google docs, zapier etc.

  • thanks for suggestions. Client is a charitable org. Paid services not an option. Me staying up late wouldn't have covered either, since I only had a few hours. Getting access to DEMO would sure be helpful in a rush. Always good to know about what is out there in the wild though.