Product Name Prefills Contact Form

Following on from earlier Magento blog posts where I’ve described how some clients may not want to actually sell their products online, but rather use the architecture of Magento as a CMS – there’s a very simple way of converting these product pages into online enquiries. Trust me, I’m not flogging a dead horse with all this talk of using Magento, but not as a shop. It really can work! A neat touch is to pre-fill the existing Magento contact form with details about the product that you’re on – this could include the product name, price and any attributes you could care to mention. Here’s how to do it:

Open your product view page: app/design/frontend/base/modern/template/product/view.phtml

<form method="post" action="/contacts">
<input name="productname" type="hidden" value="<?php echo $_helper->productAttribute($_product, $this->htmlEscape($_product->getName()), 'name') ?>" />
<input type="image" src="/images/enquire.gif" />
</form>

If you add something similar to the form above, you’ll have hidden fields pre-filled with the Product Name data, and a new ‘Enquire Online’ button. Also notice that the form’s action value points to the contact us page that Magento creates for you.

Now if you open the contacts page: app/design/frontend/base/default/template/contacts/form.phtml

<label for="subject"><?php echo $this->__('Subject') ?></label><br />
<input name="subject" id="subject" title="<?php echo $this->__('Subject') ?>" value="<?php if (isset($_POST["productname"])) { echo $_POST["productname"]; } ?>" type="text"/>
</div>

In this instance I have entered the Product Name into the ‘Subject’ field of the contact form, but some very important PHP is involved. The “if(isset” conditional is essential in not breaking your contact form in circumstances where people visit your contact page without going through the product first. If you apply the exact same rules to any data on the product page you can create a very seamless and user-friendly online enquiries process.

Who know, you then might get to use Magento as an actual ecommerce website design shop!!