Choosing e-mail addresses from a list

You don't always want to send the e-mail to the site administrator. Sometimes you want to send it to different people depending on the information in the form. One example might be customer support where some queries are technical, some are sales related, and some are about billing queries.

We'll create a form that uses a set of radio buttons to choose a department to receive the e-mail. One easy way to do this is to put the e-mail addresses in the form code but we really, really don't want them to appear anywhere on the website (even if they aren't visible to human readers, the bots will find them). So we'll also add code to look up the correct e-mail address after the form is submitted and use that in the e-mail that is sent.

Note

Note: This recipe uses some PHP and Joomla! code and is more advanced than the earlier recipes.

Getting ready

We'll use that same form again, our old friend newsletter_signup.

Open it up in the Form Editor | Email Setup tab...