Contacts are those members who can be contacted via email using a form on the website. Typically this will be the Membership Secretary so that members of the public can request more information, but it may include the Webmaster for technical queries, and possible the Publicity Officer to field enquiries from the media.
Because of the way they have been implemented within Joomla, Contacts are handled as a separate Component, so they are maintained from menu Components > Contacts. Having done that, the standard mechanism are available for Add new, Update etc.
The whole purpose of creating Contacts is to make them accessible from a simple form, into which a visitor to the site can type their message and send it, without revealing the email address of the recipient. When completing the details for a Contact, you can choose whether or not to show the phone number, address etc - if the person in question is happy to make public their phone number(s), you can provide it/them. When you have created as many contacts as you need, there are three ways to show them on the site - when you are creating a new Menu Entry, within Contacts you can choose:
- List Contact in a Category - this will show a table of all the Contacts, and allow the user to select the one they want
- Single contact - this will show a form, and within this form will be a drop-down list of all the available Contacts
- If you have installed the bespoke component RA Tools (com_ra_tools) and you allocate the Contact to category Committee Members, they will automatically be shown from menu entry Committee Members.