Dave Reid

In the last week leading up to the end of the Drupal 7 code slush, there has been a flurry of work and love going into core's Contact module. I'd like to share what has been going on with everyone else.

Anonymous user access to personal contact forms

Contact module provides personal contact forms that allow users to contact other users on the site (e.g. user/1/contact). Unfortunately if you wanted to allow anonymous users to be able to contact users in the same manner, it just wasn't possible. In Drupal core, we should not limit functionality from anonymous users, but rather features should be linked to permissions for the site administrator to choose who can do what.

This feature request was originally posted on April 11, 2006 and was nearing a rivalry with the DBTNG issue for the highest number of comments for an issue. Obviously lots of people were interested in or needed this feature. I'm proud to announce that on the issue's exact three-and-a-half year anniversary, it has finally been committed to core! For those of you interested in this for Drupal 6, I am working on back-porting this functionality into the Anonymous Contact module.

This was Contact module's own personal node/8 so we can finally let it rest in peace. There were tons of people helping with that issue and I'd like to help recognize them. The following users all helped post patches and kept the issue driving: karschsp, matt@antinomia, David Lesieur, Owen Barton, pwolanin, TBarregren, coltrane, mrtoner, deviantintegral, rleigh, swaroopch, and jonhinkle. Several other people helped review: mfer, scottrigby, greg.harvey, binford2k. I could go on forever so I apologize if I left you out.

Official maintainer

I've been posting and reviewing patches for contact.module for a while now and was starting to feel personally responsible for it, so I asked to be added as the official maintainer and it was approved! I'm excited to be helping drive long-needed improvements and bug fixes to a module that doesn't get as much recognition as it's bigger brother modules. I'd also like to thank users gpk and andypost for helping out in several issues.

Contact setttings page removed

We removed the admin/structure/contact/settings page so now we have one less settings page that everyone rarely uses! Hooray! This was accomplished by the following tasks:

• Moved the 'Enable the personal contact form by default for new users' to the user settings page (admin/config/people/accounts).
• Removed the 'Maximum number of contact form submissions per hour' option in favor of the Flood control contrib module for Drupal 7 which allows you to adjust the 'hidden' flood control variables for contact forms and login attempts.

Other cool things in progress or already fixed

• Fill out name and e-mail fields from the anonymous visitor cookie: http://drupal.org/node/440876
• Translatable contact categories: http://drupal.org/node/251482
• Select default site-wide category via URL: http://drupal.org/node/183678
• Add a default site-wide contact category on install: http://drupal.org/node/597540

Overall, we're helping make this very useful but often ignored module a little better for Drupal 7, and hoping to make it rock in Drupal 8! Come take a look at the Contact module community initiatives and see what we're working on and how you can help!