- What is litecms/contact and what does it actually do?
- litecms/contact is a contact form module for LiteCMS applications built on Laravel. It adds a public form route, configurable field validation, email notifications for new inquiries, spam protection hooks, and optional database storage with an admin listing for reviewing submissions. It is a leaf module in the LiteCMS package family and follows standard Laravel package conventions: a service provider, publishable config, migrations and views, plus web and admin routes.
- How do I install litecms/contact in a Laravel application?
- Install it with composer require litecms/contact, then publish the config, migrations, and views using the package's publish commands. Run php artisan migrate to create the submissions table if you want database storage, register the admin menu entry, and configure your mail transport and recipient addresses. A Laravel developer familiar with packages should have a working, themed form in under a day, but the package assumes you already run LiteCMS and litecms/core.
- Which Laravel, PHP, and litecms/core versions does litecms/contact support?
- You need to check the package's composer.json constraints for PHP, the Laravel major version, and litecms/core before committing, because the package has no visible changelog, release cadence, or CI status to rely on. Small modules like this often lag behind current Laravel majors, which can force either an outdated framework or an internal fork you own. Validate the support matrix against your pinned stack, including the database driver, since MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite parity is frequently untested in small packages.
- Does litecms/contact store submissions in the database, email them, or both?
- It supports both: new inquiries can trigger notification emails and can optionally be persisted for the admin listing. The package owns only its own tables, so migrations are publishable and additive to your schema. Ask whether sending is queued with retries or synchronous and lossy before you rely on email as the system of record, and plan how long you retain stored inquiries.
- Is litecms/contact safe and production-ready?
- Treat it cautiously. The package has zero stars, zero dependents, no issue history, no visible CI or test suite, no security policy, and a bus factor of one, so there is no evidence of production use. A contact form is an unauthenticated public write surface, which concentrates spam and abuse, header injection, upload handling, and admin-render XSS risk in one place. Sandbox it against your exact framework version, review the admin middleware and output escaping yourself, and confirm the license permits an internal fork before shipping.
- What spam protection does litecms/contact include out of the box?
- The package advertises spam protection hooks, which means it gives you extension points rather than a complete anti-spam stack. Expect to wire in your own honeypot fields, rate limiting, or CAPTCHA integration, and to hook in whatever provider you already trust for abuse detection. Because the form is publicly writable, budget time for this rather than assuming the module handles it.
- Can I use litecms/contact in a standard Laravel app without LiteCMS?
- It is technically possible but usually not worth it. The package carries a transitive dependency on litecms/core for admin scaffolding, menu registration, and auth middleware, so adopting a contact form implicitly pins your CMS core version, which is a platform-level commitment disguised as a feature-level convenience. For a general Laravel application, the value collapses to a contact form with an admin screen, which is cheaper to own in-house than to adopt and maintain.
- How do I customize the contact form views and validation rules in litecms/contact?
- Publish the package config and Blade views, then edit the views to match your branding and adjust the configurable validation rules for your fields. Keep validation server-side and mirrored in your form requests rather than relying on client-side checks, and re-test rendering after any theme change. If you fork the views, note that upstream updates will no longer apply cleanly.
- Does litecms/contact support file attachments on the contact form?
- Attachment support is not advertised in the package overview, so assume it is text-only unless you confirm otherwise in the source. If you add uploads yourself, define the storage location, size limits, MIME validation, and a malware posture before exposing the form publicly. Uploads on an unauthenticated endpoint are the highest-risk part of any contact form, so handle them as untrusted input end to end.
- How do I migrate from an existing contact form to litecms/contact?
- Export historical submissions into the package schema or leave them read-only in a legacy table, preserve your existing endpoint URLs with redirects so inbound links and bookmarks keep working, and carry over any CAPTCHA keys. Then re-point every CRM or notification webhook currently triggered on submit, because that is the step most often forgotten and the one that silently breaks lead flow. Test on a staging clone with production-like data volume and a real mail transport rather than the log driver.