Make form and email content to client

PHP
1

I have a small site and need to make a form where customers can enter data and have the content emailed to the client preferably formatted nicely for the client to be able to read the data properly via email.

There are lots of free and paid offers however I would like to learn how something like this is done.

Fairly OK with html, css and jquery however never touched php so far.

Where do I start?

The site is fully responsive so I would ideally like to make the form responsive as well, so using a preloaded form is not really what I am looking for.

I am new to how the data can be sent to the email address of the client, how is something like that done? Do I need php for that?

Any help is much appreciated, thank you.

2

You will need a language that runs on the server in order to be able to send emails. You could do this with Node.js and Nodemailer if you’d like to stick with using JS-based technologies. If, on the other hand, you’d like to use PHP for this, then I’d recommend using a fully-featured mailing library (namely for proper formatting of emails) like [url=https://github.com/Synchro/PHPMailer]PHPMailer. Installation and usage instructions for PHPMailer are on their GitHub page.

3

Great reply, thank you.

For this to work PHP needs to run on the server, correct?

So either check with the hosting company and see if they have PHP running on the server by default (what I assume) or install it myself, I guess through FTP access, correct?

Nodemailer looks intriguing, especially because I like to learn NodeJs.

4

Correct.

Hosting companies usually have PHP pre-installed on the server for you. If it’s not, then you’ll need to either install it via cPanel, by request to the hosting provider, or through SSH.

5

OK, thank you!