Creating a Contact Us or feedback page

Wild Apricot currently does not provide a built-in feedback form to use as the basis for a Contact Us page. You can embed a form from third parties such as Wufoo or you can use a workaround that combines the email member form with a fictitious contact named Contact Us. This workaround is described here.

In Wild Apricot, each member can be emailed via an email member system page that does not reveal the member's email address. Using this page, you route the email to the address of your choice by assigning to a non-existing member. In this way, you do not expose your email address to spammers as you would if you simply provided an email link. You can add a link to the email member form to your page header or footer, or create a Contact Us page and redirect it to the email form.

Step 1: Create the Contact Us member

By default, the title of each email form is the first and last name of the contact. So, to display an email form with a title of "Contact Us", we need to create a contact with a first name of "Contact" and a last name of "Us". So that this fictitious contact does not appear on any member directories, we will also create a hidden membership level just for this contact.

1. Under the Members menu, click Levels.
2. Add a membership level – call it something like "Hidden" – but do not check Public can apply.
3. Save the new level.
4. Under the Members menu, click Summary.
5. Click the Add member button.
6. Assign the hidden membership level to the member.
7. Enter Contact as the member's first name and Us as the member's last name.
8. Enter the email address you want the emails to be sent to. The email cannot be already assigned to an existing contact record.
   
9. Click Save to save the new member record.
10. If prompted to approve the membership, click Approve.
11. Click the Privacy tab for the new contact and make sure the Send message form, First name, and Last name can be viewed by anybody.
    If the first name or last name is set to members only, then the phrase "Member details" will appear in place of the "Contact Us" heading.
12. If you have any existing member directories, modify the settings for the member directory gadgets so that the hidden membership level you just created is excluded.

Step 2: Set up the profile page

Each member's public profile page includes an email form, which we are going to use as our contact us form. The member profile is a system page that automatically appears when someone clicks a member's name within a member directory.

So that the email form title reads "Contact Us", we need to review the settings for the member profile page.

1. Click the Settings menu then click the Privacy option within the Members section.
2. Make sure Profile access is set to Show profile to others.
3. Make sure the first of the Fields to use as page title is First name Last name, and that any other fields – such as Organization – are fields you didn't complete for your Contact Us member.
   
4. If either of these settings are not correct, click Edit and make the changes then click Save.

Step 3: Link to the email member form

The final step is to link to the email member form for the Contact Us member. You can link to the form from your header or footer...

...or add a Contact Us page that redirects to the email form.

For the complete code required to redirect a page, click here.

Whether you are linking from your header or footer, or redirecting a contact page, you enter the following as the destination:

/Sys/PublicProfile/SendEmail/userid

where userid is the Contact Us member's user ID. For example, if the user ID is 8814546, then the destination would be:

/Sys/PublicProfile/SendEmail/8814546

Adding instructions to the email form

If you want to add a line of instructions to the email form, follow these steps:

1. Create a membership field that is only available to the hidden membership level.
2. Go the contact record for the Contact Us member and enter the instructions you want to display in the membership field you created.
3. Go to the global member privacy settings (not the privacy settings for the Contact Us member). From there, include the instructions field as a subtitle after Last name First name. The instructions now appear as a subtitle on the email member form.

Removing the breadcrumbs

Since this workaround uses the email member form, it includes, by default, breadcrumbs that identify the form by name.

If you don't want this to appear – since it reveals the workaround – you can remove the breadcrumbs gadget from the page template used by the Email member system page – or switch it to a page template that doesn't include a breadcrumbs gadget.