Shortcut to creating contact or support forms in Rails

On several projects I’ve needed a quick and easy way to build a contact form for a quick Rails project.

The temptation is to start building out a form, maybe building out a model and then playing around with a mailer or third party service (SendGrid etc). I have found it more effective and quicker to embed a form from a ticket provider such as FreshDesk or ZenDesk which both have generous free plans or trial periods.

These are quick to integrate, have built in validation, and are a great ‘stop-gap’ until a more robust system is built.