I’m all about Lightbox AJAXy goodness. You can see that in the tooltips and the Shadowbox overlay that Picturegrid and my portfolio page uses. I was super-excited to come across a way to do this with my contact form.
For a few of my larger sites (most notably, agapefest.com) I’ve ended up using cFormsII, which is really good in its own right, but not exactly simple or perfect. I’ve had a hell of a time getting the fields lined up correctly within the stylesheets. But that’s beside the point.
The plugin I found is called SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) and it’s written and maintained by Eric Martin who, by the way, seems a very decent human being.
Basically, using the JQuery JavaScript library of your choice (mine is Prototype/Scriptaculous) a small, simple contact form pops open in a lightbox-style overlay allowing a visitor to enter his name, email and message. It emails it to you and closes. And won’t conflict with whatever other library you may use (I happen to use Prototype/Scriptaculous for most of the other stuff here). <– Eric clarified in the comments for me (See! He is a decent human being!)
It’s slick and fast. No loading of a new page, no complicated backend. There’s a simple admin screen with options that make sense (where does the email get sent? what’s your name? what JS library do you use?) and that’s about it.
Plus, did I mention Eric’s a decent guy? More than decent, he actually commented here when I made a blog post about some issues I was having with it. He’s super-nice on his own site too. Anyway. Check it out if you want a good means of setting up a contact form. You can style the whole thing too if you’re into that sort of thing.
Oh yeah. If you click “Contact” in the menu bar on this page you’ll see what it does.
Joel – thanks for the review and comments. Being a “decent human being” and treating people with respect has always been a priority for me, so thanks for noticing
One thing I’d like to clarify though…SMCF was built to work with jQuery and requires it to work. However, if your library of choice happens to be something else, you can still use SMCF with jQuery without creating any conflicts!
-Eric