Is there anyway to customize a contact us form without using the page.ss template?
I think you can do this from within the administration area, if you look at the demo site goto the contact us page and then the form tab. You can then add fields using the button at the top.
I have only just started using SS so I may be wrong :)
well i can add fields and stuff, but the layout is all wrong and I don't know how to change that.
Yeah you want to edit the CSS. Generally the idea is that the HTML is sweet, and the presentation is CSS driven.
If you upload a screenshot of your page or something I'm sure someone can provide CSS ideas; if not try the WSG mailing list; that's a good CSS maillist.
If you're meaning the layout around $Form, which the form from a contact form is rendered into - you can create UserDefinedForm.ss in your project which would allow you to change the layout for that page type (contact form). Styling the form, however, would be playing with the CSS since the form markup is automatically generated by SilverStripe.
Hope this helps,
So would you just create a UserDefinedForm.ss and put $searchForm in there? And then add the css styles to the content?
Copy your main Layout include (ie - templates/Layout/Page.ss) into UserDefinedForm.ss and then put $Content, $Form etc into divs and style it with CSS that way.