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Section Index

Form Administration

The idea behind this module is to create forms to collect information from your clients with, such as a "Contact Us" form which allows users to send an e-mail message to a predefined information account. Click on "Form Administration" in the "Admin Suite" and you will be taken to the window shown below.

Create or Delete Form

The first thing shown in this window is a list of links that allow you to delete any of the existing forms (identified by both form number and name in brackets). Simply click on the form you would like to delete and then click 'OK' when the confirm message appears.

Below this is the area in which you can add a new form. To add a form, first enter in its name into the "Form Name" text field. Next, you want to specify the "Confirm Message", which is the message displayed to the user after he/she has submitted the form. If you would like the form results e-mailed to you or someone else (like with a "Contact Us" form) then you should click the "On" radio button beside "Mail Results" and enter the recipients e-mail address in the "Mail Recipient" field.

The "Return URL" field should contain the web address that users will be taken to when they click "Back" in the submission confirmation window (where "Confirm Message" is shown). The "Show Public" radio buttons specify whether you would like to make this form available on the front end of your site ("On"=available) and the "Protected" radio buttons specify whether a user must be part of a specific member level to access this form (covered in detail in Access Control).

The "Short Description" and "Long Description" fields should be filled with the short and long descriptions of what this form is used for and what information it collects. If at any point you want to start over, you can click on the "Reset" button at the bottom of the page and all the fields will be emptied. When you have finished filling in all the fields in the window, click "Submit" and you will be taken to a creation confirmation screen. From this window, click on "Form" to be returned to the main form menu.

Add or Delete Form Controls

From this window, you must select the form to which you would like to Add/Remove content. Click on your selection and you will be directed to the window shown below.

This window is broken up into a series of tables, each of which allows you to add a new form field of a specific type. When designing a new form, it's usually best to draw it out on paper beforehand so you can have an idea of what it will look like. Then, go through the form, adding the new fields in the order you would like them to appear. Each table has it's own set of specific instructions that should be followed when adding a field of that type. If at any point you would like to clear the information that is in one of the tables you are currently entering, you can hit its "Reset" button and you can start that field specification over. When you have completed the information for adding a new field, click that table's "Submit" button and the page will refresh.

Note: in other areas of the admin suite, you have to enter a "space" when you want to leave a text area blank; Do not do that in this window as it will produce anomalous results. You also want to make sure that you don't type a ":" after any of your names or descriptions, as they will be added automatically where needed.

After you have submitted a new form field, it will appear in a list of fields near the top of the window. You can either change or delete these form fields by clicking on the appropriate link shown in this list. If you are happy with this field, you can add additional form fields in the same way.

Once you have completed adding content to this form, click on "Form" in the top left of the window.

Form Option

From this window, you must select the form which you would like to edit the options for. Click on your selection and you will be directed to the window shown below.

From this window you can change any of the information you submitted when you created the form in the "Create or Delete Form" window. At any point, if you wish to re-enter all the data in this window, you can click "Reset" to return all the fields to their saved states. When you are happy with the form details, click "Submit" and you will be taken to a confirmation window where you can choose another form to edit.

If you are finished editing your forms, click on "Form" to return to the main form window.

Form Content

From this window you must select the form which you would like to edit the content for. Click on your selection and you will be directed to the window shown below.

All the form fields for the form you selected will now be listed under the list of forms. You can edit or delete any of these fields by clicking on the appropriate link for that form field. If you want to edit, click on "Update [field name]" and you will be directed to the window shown below.

From this window, you can edit all the same information that you entered in the "Add or Delete Form Controls" window plus you can also specify whether to hide this field from the user, as well as other field type specific controls (ie for the radio button shown in the window above, you can change the number of selections that are shown per row in the form).

If at any point you need to start this form field content over, you can click on the "Reset" button to return all the text areas (to their saved values) in this window. Once you have made the changes you wanted to make for this form field, click "Submit". Now you can either make changes to other form fields in this form or you can select another form from the top of the page to make changes to. When you are done changing content for your forms, click "Form" to return to the main form window.

View Form Submission

The first two options in this window are two pull-down lists that allow you to specify which form submissions are shown. By choosing from either "Response Status" or "Form to View", you can specify the form for which you would like to view submissions.

Below these two filter controls is a list of form submissions that meet the specifications you have made with the two pull-down lists. Shown is the "Submitter Name", which is the member account that submitted the form, "Time Submitted", "Submitter IP", which is the IP number that this member submitted from, and the "Status", which at this time does nothing. If you would like to view a form submission, you can do so by clicking the "View" button to the far right of the appropriate submission listing. This will take you to the window shown below.

When viewing the form submission, you get all the same information you did in the listing shown in the previous window. In addition, you get the user's ID integer, the user's e-mail address and a listing of the answers they gave for all the forms with the associated questions.

When you are finished viewing the information for this form submission, you can click on "View Submit" to view more form submissions or you can click on "Form" to return to the main form menu.

Export Form Submission

The idea behind this part of "Form Administration" is to dump all the form submissions from the data base in to a "|" delimited text file. This file can be used to import the raw form data into a spreadsheet or another database program. In this window, you are shown two pull-down lists that allow you to specify which submissions you want to include in the database dump. You can choose by Response Status or by which Form was used.. When you have selected which submissions you would like to dump, click on the "Export Form Submission" button and you will be taken to a window that confirms the text file was created. From this new window, click on "Click here to download the text file" and the text file will be displayed in your web browser. When you are viewing the text file, you can go to "File" on your menu bar and "Save As" to save the text file to your computer.

Once you have saved the text file, use your browser's back button to return to the confirmation window and click "Form".

Administrate Pages

The idea behind this window is to make changes to the format of the Form pages. If you need to make any changes, click on the appropriate "Edit" button, which will take you to the window shown below.

The two options (page name and title image) are for naming your page and you should choose one of them.

If you prefer to have an image for the title instead of the text for the page, you can click on the "Browse" button and choose an image from your hard drive.

Note that a title image replaces the "Page Name" in the page content, but not on the window title.

Next you need to type your "Meta tags".

What is a Meta Tag?

Finally, if you are familiar with HTML you can select "YES" for the "Allow HTML" option. This allows you to enter HTML code in this page’s text fields. If you don't want to put in HTML then select "NO" and your text will be properly formatted.

When you entered all your information, don't forget to click "Submit"!!!!!

After you have submitted you can click on "Page List" to administrate more pages, or you can click on "Admin Suite".