Best AJAX Tutorials for Forms

No matter what type of website you have, it’s essential to provide an avenue that allows your visitors to contact you.  A form provides such an avenue, as your visitors can contact you to offer feedback on your site and its content, plus much more.  It’s also a great alternative to simply posting your email address on your site, which could attract a lot of spam.

Besides having forms that are functional, you should try your best to make them aesthetically pleasing as well to make your site more inviting.  AJAX is a powerful tool when it comes to creating forms that are user-friendly and easy to program.  There are numerous tutorials on the web that display its value.  Here are some of the top AJAX tutorials that you should visit before you embark on your form-creating journey.

How to Make a Slick AJAX Contact Form with jQuery and PHP



This tutorial is very informative and easy to follow.  It teaches you how to create an AJAX contact form that not only looks good, but also provides convenient functionality to visitors.  CSS helps to give the form its attractive appearance via gradients, curved borders, box-shadow, opacity, and more. 

The form goes far beyond looks, however, and its functionality is its highlight.  The form is embedded in the page, and can be accessed by simply clicking on a “Send us an email” link.  This quick access allows visitors to submit their data without ever having to leave the current page.  Compare this with some sites that have a separate contact form page that makes a visitor jump all around the site just to complete a simple task.

While the form you’ll learn to create is great within itself, the tutorial is solid because it touches on various important topics.  You’ll learn about HTML5 form fields, CSS techniques, how to use PHP to write a secure form mailer, how to make AJAX requests via jQuery, and more.

Link: http://www.elated.com/articles/slick-ajax-contact-form-jquery-php/

Creating a jQuery and AJAX Powered Contact Form



This tutorial is as straightforward as they come.  As you can tell from the title, you’ll be learning how to create a contact form that is powered by AJAX and jQuery.  The form also sends emails to a specific email address without a page refresh.  There are fields for name, email, subject, and comment.  As a highlight, the subject field contains a drop-down list for convenience.  A little bit of CSS styling is added as well to make the form easy on the eyes.  To ensure that all submissions are complete and filled out correctly, you’ll see how to implement validation.  This way, if a user forgets to fill in their name properly, a message will appear that says, “Please fill in a valid name! Must be between 3 and 50 characters.”  Similar messages appear for the email and subject fields.  All in all, this tutorial is clear, concise, and contains some valuable knowledge that you can apply when creating forms for your site.

Link: http://tutorialpot.com/2011/07/creating-a-jquery-and-ajax-powered-contact-form/

Easy jQuery AJAX PHP Contact Form

If you want a tutorial that is quick and to the point, here is one that should catch your eye.  It’s not lengthy by any means, so you can run through it and apply its techniques in a small amount of time.  You’ll learn how to make a simple contact form using AJAX, jQuery, and PHP.  The form has just three fields for name, email address, and message, and it allows you to post form values to the processing file and get results without the need for a page refresh.  The tutorial is one part of a two-part series, so make sure to take a look at the follow-up for details on how to add basic validation to the form.

Link: http://www.devblog.co/easy-jquery-ajax-php-contact-form/

A Fancy AJAX Contact Form


Just because a contact form isn’t necessarily an exciting website element, does not mean it has to look dull.  This tutorial teaches you how to create a highly functional AJAX contact form that also looks great.  The form lives up to its fancy moniker with clean, modern styling.  CSS, jQuery, and PHP are used, as is the formValidator plugin which helps with, you guessed it, form validation.  Lastly, the PHPMailer class is used for sending out the contact form emails. 

At its core, the contact form at the heart of this tutorial is basic.  You have fields for name, email, and message, but you also get a nifty little drop-down list in the subject field.  An added bonus is a field for spam prevention, which requires you to enter an answer to a simple math equation (8 + 1, for example) to ensure that human visitors are using your contact form for legitimate purposes.  The tutorial takes compatibility into account, so the form will degrade gracefully when necessary.

Link: http://tutorialzine.com/2009/09/fancy-contact-form/

How to Create a PHP Contact Form with AJAX

Here’s another simple, yet effective tutorial that shows you how to create a PHP contact form with AJAX.  The final product is a contact form with fields for name, email, subject, and message.  The tutorial is not the most detailed you will find, but it does give you some quick practice with creating standard contact forms.

Link: http://kvijayanand.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/how-to-create-php-contact-form-with-ajax/

Learn How to AJAXify Comment Forms

Some people prefer to learn by reading, while others prefer to learn by watching and listening.  This tutorial should appeal to the latter group, as it’s a video screencast that teaches you how to spruce up a standard contact form by adding some animations.  Validation is discussed, and there’s a section on using an AJAX post request to help submit the form to your MySQL database in an asynchronous manner.

Link: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/news/learn-how-to-ajaxify-comment-forms/

AJAX Form Validation

Ok, so this tutorial won’t show you how to create a specific AJAX contact form.  Why does it make the list?  Simply put, the topic it covers is essential to the form creation process: validation.  Validation is not only important on your end, but also for visitors as well.  It helps visitors know what’s required and what’s accepted when filling out a form, and it acts as a guide to make the process of filling out forms much more efficient. 

Just imagine if you had a huge form on your site that required a lot of personal data, and a visitor filled it out from top to bottom, only to find out that they didn’t enter the correct type of information in one field.  Would they want to start over? Would they just leave your site altogether?  You can’t know for sure, but implementing validation properly in your forms can help such problems from arising.  For this reason, the tutorial is worth a look to give you some added background information on the topic.

Link: http://www.roscripts.com/Ajax_form_validation-152.html