Setting up the formbuilder

22/04/2008 22:07 by Thomas Andersen

Having forms on your site is one efficient way to gather/ask for input from your visitors. The form can be of any types such as leads, a questionaire, feedback on your products/services or maybe a simple quiz. When you know what data you need, it is just the matter of creating a new menu item and from there you can visually build the form.

Note! The contenttype, resource and datasource files refered to in this article are found in the cms-packages folder shiped with the 4.4 release.

Create the Content Type

1. Create a new contenttype in the content type repository.
2. Choose Forms as the content handler.
3. Open the datasource XML file found in datasources folder.

Note! If you can not find the Form type, ask your system administrator if he/she can make this availabe.

Configure the archvie

Now you have to make sure that the contributors can create content categories for the form input in the archives.

1. In you archive configuration, move the FormBuilder content type from available content types to selected content types.
2. Save the new archive configuration.

Content created with the formbuilder needs to be created in a content category.
You can now go on and create categories which holds form builder content in the archive or do this later.

Important!
Depending on your site configuration the form builder categories must have create rights for the groups or users that should be allowed to post to the archive.

If the content is confidential and should not be published, you must make sure that the Browse right is not checked. This will tighten the security to the maximum.

Deploy the Resource Files

Now you must deploy the XSLT file found in dav/modules/formbuilder folder.

Create the Object

The next step is to create an object that can display the form on the page.

Use the newly deployed formbuilder.xsl XSL as the stylesheet.

In the datasource panel, open the datasources/formbuilder.ds.xml file and paste the contents in the datasource field.

Create the Page Template

The form builder is actually a page so you need to create a new page template.

Tip! You can copy one of the existing page templates. This way you do not need This way you do not need to configure the page positions and datasource XSL from scratch.

1. Create a new pagetemplate(or copy an existing one)
2. Set Form as the page type.
3. In the Page Configuration tab select your page XSL. Normaly the standard page XSL should do it.
4. Place the formBuilder object in the desired position.
5. Save the template.

This completes the configuration, and the formbuilder is now ready for use.

In the next article we are going to show you the basics of building forms, but if you want to test your configuration you can already now go to the menu and explore the formbuilder.