Based on our very positive experience in building the IONICA video platform sites, we recently revamped the IONICA corporate web site in Drupal.

One problem we ran into was that any unauthenticated visitor who visited the contact page would get an ugly “Access denied You are not authorized to access this page.” error. This was not good as all our regular site visitors are not authenticated.

After some digging, I was able to find the fix.. and it’s actually quite simple.

To allow anyone, even unauthenticated users (called anonymous users by Drupal), to view and use a Drupal 7 site’s forms, log in to your site as the administrative user and follow the steps below.

• Click the modules menu.
• Next, click the permissions tab in the top-right.
• Scroll down to the section labelled “Contact.”
• In the row, “Use the site-wide contact form,” tick the anonymous user box. Tick the others too if you would like authenticated and administrative users to have access to the form as well (you probably do).
• Click the Save button.

That’s it! Now every visitor to your site can access the contact form.