Symphony.

Hi everyone,

Been a while, was good to meet a great number of talented guys and gals in Cologne this Sept-Oct.. had an awesome time so thanks to all!

I recall a conversation not part of the formal talks, more in passing regarding a client having the ability to build a page where that were allowing a user the ability to create their own contact forms/application/enquiry type forms... so that for example a Client could create a new offer page with a new application form based on an event or set of input fields?

Has anyone else experienced this kind of requirement in the past and if so, would you be willing to share your approach at all?

Haven't thought deeply about this but was guessing I would create a section that had a lot of text areas and text boxes with a checkbox next to them for show or hide maybe... and in turn I would create an event that sends a mail to an admin when one of the forms is filled in.. see told you I hadn't thought too much about it.

Any assistance in where to start would be awesome.

Thanks a million +

We've got a project coming up that has had this requirement mentioned. I've not given it too much thought, but figured the Dynamic Text Group might be useful:

In a section named Forms each entry would comprise a Dynamic Text Field which you have configured with two fields: Label (text) and Type (select, e.g. single line, multiline, checkbox). The author can add rows to this and reorder them. You'd loop over these on the frontend and write the form widgets to the HTML.

Sending is tricky. Would you need to store the details in Symphony in a structured way? You could write a relatively simple event which accepts the form submission and emails you the contents (looping over items in the $_POST array). You could dump the entire form post into a textarea in an entry for good measure, if your client demanded that it be stored as well as emailed.

Hi Nick, Dynamic Text Group is actually a great choice! good call!

Not really needing to store the data in the backend really. Just mail the form data to a recipient admin email somewhere I guess.

Yes storing it in an entry textarea sounds ideal for archive/loggin of submittal!

Thanks Nick, will delve a little deeper now... This is the one thing that will tilt the Client into Symphony over another CMS we've used.

C'mon Symphony :)

@Moonoo2 I realize this does not answer your exact question but I've chosen to go another route a couple of times: use dedicated third-party tools such as Wufoo. Wufoo offers a lot of extra's (logging, advanced sending rules, statistics, etc.).

I'd like to be able to do this in Symphony but in my experience clients are quite happy with what e.g. Wufoo offers and to replicate this functionality in Symphony would be a lot of work.

When using a third-party app is not much of a stumbling block I would advise going with that.

(Now it *might be awesome to see if it would be possible to hook up Symphony with the Wufoo API (through e.g. Dashboard) so that the other options (stats, entries, etc) are available in the Symphony admin)

Out of interest how do you integrate Wufoo? Do you link off to a form hosted on Wufoo from your site (let the authors paste the link into Symphony?) or is there a fancier way of embedding the form inline in a Symphony site?

To be honest: this bugs me the most about this approach (not the remote loggin in): integration of these forms is usually done through an iframe (yuk). So yes: since an iframe is often difficult to style etc. we sometimes choose to simply link to a remote form-page. Both less than ideal options.

I believe there is a possibility to integrate the form using Wufoo's API, but I've yet to really dive into that.

Update: I just thought of a third (also less than ideal) option: just build the form in Wufoo and copy-paste the rendered HTML in your pages (through e.g. an entry form-code textfield). This way building the form is done through the handy Wufoo interface, the Wufoo server-side will also handle the form submissions, but all HTML/CSS/JS is rendered locally.

This requires authors to (sporadically) meddle with code, but saves us from using iframes.

Thinking about it, an extension pluggin Symphony into the Wufoo API would totally rock.