Recommend to a friendiFormBuilder is very easy to set up, but because it has so many options it might bit a bit confusing for beginners, so a Cheat Sheet1 for the basic usage was created. Keep reading it!
Warning! This section applies only to Ideal Form Builder (iFormBuilder) PRO. Some features mentioned here are only present in the PRO release.
- Installation / Update:
Please read the Installing iFormBuilder article; - Creating a form:
- Go to the back-end of your site and click on Components → iFormBuilder.
- Click on the button in order to create a new form with basic form fields.
- Fields: Please read the Form Fields section for form field's information;
- Details: Under this tab you can add the Metadata, publishing and language information;
- Mail Settings: Set the Recipient Email address, the Recipient HTML template and configure the Auto Reply email;
- Thank you Page: Whether or not to display a Thank you page Or to redirect to another page after the form is submitted;
- Integration:
- Socket: Opens a 'parallel' connection to submit the form to another URL as well. It uses fsockopen to open Internet or Unix domain socket connection;
- SalesForce: With Salesforce Web-to-Lead, you can gather information from the form and automatically generate new leads in SalesForce;
- SpreadSheets: Automatically populate a Google SpreadSheet document with the information submitted from the form;
- Custom Code:
- CSS: iFormBuilder inherits most of the CSS styling from your template's CSS file, but if you want you can easily add CSS rules to the form page;
- Javascript: If you want to create a more advanced field and need to load a Javascript code in the page use this field to add the code to the <head> portion of the site.
- PHP: Execute PHP custom code on page submission (onSubmit), on page validation (onValidate) and/or when the form has already finished all processing (OnComplete).
- Associations: Used in multi-lingual websites to have associated forms in different languages.
- Displaying the form: There are several ways to display the form, among them we have:
- Menu:
- Go to Menus → Menu Manager and select the Menu where you want the form to display.
- Select New button from the toolbar
- Menu Item Type: Contact Enhanced → Single Contact Form (or other menu item type);
- Give it a Menu Title and set Parent Item.
- Contact Display Options: you can override most Contact Details configuration options;
- Page Display Options: Set a Page Title and a heading;
- Select Save;
- Embed the form into an article: Go to Extensions →Plugin Manager, search for iFormBuilder Content plugin, configure and enabled it.
- Load in a module position: Go to Extensions →Module Manager and either edit an existing iFormBuilder module or create a new one and configure it;
- Display in the site tab: Go to Extensions →Plugin Manager, search for iFormBuilder tab, configure and enable it;
- Menu:
- Clean the Joomla and your browser's cache and go to your website and check it out. It should be good to go, but you can also configure the plugins included in the package:
- Captcha Configuration:
- iFormBuilder PLUS and PRO packages come with a core captcha plugin called SecurImage. It is very customizable and if you want to use it, go to Extensions → Plugin Manager → Captcha - SecurImage and change the options as you wish;
1 A cheat sheet or crib sheet is a concise set of notes used for quick reference;