PHPMailer - Show success message after redirect - laravel-4

Question

I building a very simple app with Laravel4 and so far i have managed to set up PHPMailer to work with a contact form, the users fill in their details and send me an email, normal stuff, everything works fine.
After the user sent the email successfully, he is redirected to the home page via
if($m->send()) {
header('Location: /path/to/home/');
die();
}
Now what i need is a success message that appears at the top of the homepage if the user has been redirected after a successfully sent email.
I have a div with .success class sitting on top of my home page, absolutely positioned out of view, with a negative Y value.
I tried pulling it down after on $m->send() like so:
if($m->send()) {
header('Location: /path/to/home/');
echo "<script type='text/javascript'>
$('.success').animate({
top: 0
}, 2000);
</script>";
die();
}
but it didnt work. In fact, nothing i echo after the header() has any effect.
What can I do?
Thank you guys!

Answer 1

This is simple HTTP - when you set the Location header, it's telling the browser to leave the page you're on and go somewhere else - anything that happens afterwards (like that little JS snippet) will never reach the browser. You need to put that snippet on the page you're redirecting to, not on this one.

Answer 2

I solved the problem after realizing that you can't use jquery on the document before you actually link the jquery lib in.
So, in my phpmailer config file, I set $_SESSION['success'] = true before i redirect with the header('Location: /path/to/home/'); , and then, on the Homepage, the page I wanted the success message to be displayed on, I added this bit of code (AFTER linking the jQuery library):
<?php
if(isset($_SESSION['success']) && $_SESSION['success'] == true ) {
?>
<script type='text/javascript'> $('.success').animate({top : 0}, 'normal').delay(3000).animate({top : -57}, 'normal');</script>
<?php
} else {
$_SESSION['success'] = false;
}
?>
I don't know if this is a good practice but it does work.
I also had to session_start(); on my Homepage (obviously).
Hope this helps anyone in the same situation!