Creating & Managing Forms

Managing Your Forms

Click on the "Forms" submenu link to bring up the Forms listing page. Here is an overview of all the available forms, their starting and ending dates, and whether they are "active" or not. Also listed are the total number of submissions so far for each form and the facility to change their published status. Unpublished forms will not be displayed or available to use.

Each form also has a special tag which can be used to display it anywhere in the site. This is what the plugin 'Content - redFORM' is for. It was installed and activated as part of the installation.
The tag consists of the form ID enclosed by the {redform}{/redform} set. You can use this tag within Joomla! content articles as well as content from third-party components. 
For example,  {redform}2{/redform} entered in an article, will have the form with the ID 2 show up in your article in front. 

 

There are six function buttons on this listing screen, "New", "Edit", "Copy", "Publish", "Unpublish" and "Delete". "Copy" allows you to duplicate one or more forms and all the fields associated to each. Simply check the boxes next to the form names that need to be duplicated and click on "Copy", then make the necessary adjustments to the new copies and save.

If you'd like to see more details on the submissions for each form, simply click on the "Submitters" link that is present in each form overview. This will load up the Submitters listing screen with the form preselected. You can of course do this manually from the Submitters listing screen.

Form details

When adding a new form or editing an existing one, there are several options available ranging from basic settings to designing the content of the messages submitters will see and the e-mails they will receive after filling the form. These settings are grouped under four tabs: Details, Notification, Confirmation and Payment.

Details

This section deals with the forms basic details. Here is where you can label the form and set whether that label will appear when the form is displayed on the front-end. You can determine which user group levels have access to the form, and add a CSS class name to give the form a unique style hook.

You can set the date and time that the form should be available to display; by default this space gets filled with the current date and time that the form was created. You can of course set this time further off into the future if the form needs to be available on a certain date. Conversely, you can set whether the form should "expire", or automatically unpublished itself, and if so then set the end date for that.

Finally you can set whether the form should include a Captcha field, so that submitters must answer a question and "prove they are human" before the form gets submitted, and change the published state of the form at any point in time. Note that at least one redFORM Captcha plugin must be installed for the Captcha feature to work.

Templates and Notification emails

This section deals with the message that can be displayed to the visitor after they have submitted the form and the e-mails that get sent out as a result of their submission.

The first thing you can configure is whether to display a notification after the form has been submitted or not. If so, there is a space where you can add the text, images and other HTML formatted content which make up the message. 

You can redirect the user to another page or address after they have submitted the form by filling in the URL in the "Redirect url" field, such as  http://www.example.com. Filling in this field means the user will be redirected instead of seeing the notification message.

If there is someone who needs to be informed whenever a new submission has been made, you can set "Informed contact person" to yes followed by their e-mail address. You can also choose whether the data that was collected in the form should be included in that e-mail.

You can choose to send a "submission confirmation e-mail" to let people who have filled in forms know their submissions were received. Simply set "Send e-mail to submitter" to Yes, write what will appear as the subject of the email they will receive, and fill in the content of the message. You can add text, images and other HTML formatted content. 

Notes on Conditional recipients coming

Confirmation options

New in redFORM 3. To be updated

Payment options

In addition to collecting the data people fill in their forms, redFORM can also be used to display prices and collect online payments. This can be useful, for example, when wanting to offer simple items for sale or collecting a submission fee. To use this feature, "Activate payment" must be set to yes and there must be at least one redFORM payment plug-in installed and configured.

When it has been decided that the form will be used to collect payments, you can set whether the total price will be displayed at the end of the form, and the currency in which prices will be displayed and charged. There are also spaces to store the messages that will be displayed to inform the status of the transaction; that payment is either being processed or that it was successful and accepted. 

Once payment has been received and confirmed, payment notification e-mails can be sent out to both the contact person and the person who just made the payment. You can customize the subject and message body of each e-mail, and use the variable %s in either to refer to the name of the form.