This tutorial will show you how to add a contact form to the front of your Joomla site. This will allow people to contact you easily and quickly without having to navigate through to a dedicated "Contact Us" page.

If you've worked with any kind of database-driven web application, you know that HTML forms are the foundation of the user's interaction with the database. Applications use forms to take input from the user and store it or use it to manipulate existing data. Unfortunately, HTML forms can potentially be quite tedious to write. In this article, we will look at a handful of helpful functions that Joomla! provides to save you time preparing your forms.

Because of it ubiquitous nature, automatic emailing is something that many clients expect. People want to be notified immediately of changes on their sites -- when a new article has been submitted, or a blog comment has been posted. Joomla! already provides some of this functionality out of the box by notifying administrators when a user has registered on their site. You, however, may find yourself needing to implement emailing in your own components. As you may have already guessed, Joomla! provides a very helpful class for this: JMail.

Long-time users of Joomla are quite familiar with content plugins. When you want to take some user-entered text and reformat it into something else, there’s nothing quite as handy as having a content plugin ready to do your bidding.

It's no secret that Joomla's default editor lacks quite a few features. We often recommend that people upgrade to Joomla Content Editor (JCE). You can click here to find full instructions how to install JCE, including a video.

What we're going to cover in this tutorial are 5 really great features of JCE that people often don't realise are there: