action.php for a website send message form

Question

I have a form on a website to send a message, the message should be send to an email address.

As I am new to website building I am playing around but can't get the form working with a action.php file. When I have uploaded the HTML code and the action-page.php to the server (in the same subfolder) the message I type on the website is not send at all. I receive no email and when I click the send button and I am forwarded to a blank page in the browser. Preferably i just stay on the same page and get a "Your message has been sent" notification, but this is a "nice-to-have" I just want to get it working.

I used: https://html.form.guide/email-form/php-form-to-email.html as a reference for the code.

1. What is wrong or why it is not working?

The code for the website message form is the following:

<div class="o-screen-contact__col-form">
    <form class="c-form js-form-validation" action="action-page.php" method="post">
      <label for="contact-name">Jouw naam</label>
      <input class="c-form__field" id="contact-name" type="text" placeholder="Bijvoorbeeld, Jade van de Ven" required>
      <label for="contact-email">Jouw e-mail</label>
      <input class="c-form__field" id="contact-email" type="email" placeholder="Jouwemail@email.nl" required>
      <label for="contact-message">Jouw bericht</label>
      <textarea class="c-form__field" id="contact-message" name="name" placeholder="Schrijf hier jouw bericht of zorg" required></textarea>
      <fieldset class="u-text-right">
        <button class="c-button c-button--primary" type="submit" name="contact-submit">Zend mij een bericht</button>
      </fieldset>
    </form>
  </div>

I used the post method and made an action-page.php file for the actual message to be send to an email adress.

The action-page.php file looks like this:

<?php
$name = $_POST['contact-name'];
$visitor_email = $_POST['contact-email'];
$message = $_POST['contact-message'];
?>


<?php
    $email_from = 'zorg@ontzorg-zwolle.nl';

    $email_subject = "Nieuwe email website ontzorg-zwolle";

    $email_body = "You have received a new message from the user $contact-name.\n".
                        "Here is the message:\n $contact-message".
?>

<?php

  $to = "zorg@ontzorg-zwolle.nl";

  $headers = "From: $email_from \r\n";

  $headers .= "Reply-To: $visitor_email \r\n";

  mail($to,$email_subject,$email_body,$headers);

?>

2. Where to put the action-page.php file on the server

I have put the action-page.php file in the same folder als the index.html file (where the message form is in). Is that the right place? Or do I need to put the file in some other place to be called properly?

Answer 1

You've done everything correctly, but you missed the name attribute in the input tags.

Your code should be like this,

<input class="c-form__field" id="contact-name" name="contact-name" type="text" placeholder="Bijvoorbeeld, Jade van de Ven" required>

You have to add the name attribute in all the input tags like above code...