Almost every website has a simple contact form, but what if you want to do something a little bit fancier? In this talk, we are going to look at how you can make complex forms and applications without any coding, and how you can make these even more powerful with minimal custom code. By the end of this talk, you will have the knowledge and tools to build mobile responsive applications which will have built in content history, CAPTCHA to prevent spam, email triggers, dynamic reporting, export to PDF or excel, and the ability to show/hide questions based on user input. You can get BF Survey from www.tamlynsoftware.com

1. Building forms and applications
with Joomla! 3
Presented by Tim Plummer
Sydney JUG May 2013

2. Have you had bad experiences with
forms & applications in Joomla?

3. Or has it all been sunshine and
lollypops?

4. What if a form extension used Joomla
standards?
• No unique interface
• More familiar and easy to use
• Template & media overrides

5. What if your unique configuration
actually generated Joomla code?

6. Form vs Application
• Form
– Simple requirements – data entry
– Fields to complete, and submit
– Response captured in email/database
• Application
– Breaking into multiple steps - only show user what
they need to see
– Flexible workflow
– Reporting
– Permissions
– Audit trail

8. Standard Field Types
• Text
• Textarea
• Radio
• Checkbox
• Dropdown
• Date

9. Mobile responsive and accessible

10. Captcha to prevent spam

11. Single page form

12. Multipage form

13. Multipage tab

14. Attachment uploading

15. Rating question type

16. SQL lookup
• Populate drop down options via an SQL
lookup

17. Show/hide questions
based on user input

18. Show/hide questions
based on user input

19. Prepopulate data on the form
• Append &fieldname=yourdata to your URL to
pre-populate any field

20. Results graphically represented

21. Dynamic reporting with PDF
generation

23. Export to Excel

24. Front end question management

25. Front end question management

26. Come back and finish the form later

27. Built in content version history

28. Customise look with CSS overrides
• Same form with different CSS applied

29. Layout overrides
• For example, to move position of CAPTCHA

30. Email Templates

31. Email triggers
• Initial save
• When a field changes
• When a field is a
specific value

32. Email invites
• Unique URLs {uurl} in email invites encrypt
username (like Akeeba download id), and pre-
populate Name and Email

33. All this in one extension?

34. Can anyone guess?

35. Version 2.0.0

36. System Requirements
• Joomla 3.2.3 or greater
• FOF (in core)
• Bootstrap & jQuery (in core)
• GD Image Library (provided
by most web hosts)

37. Four simple steps
• 1 – create a category
• 2 – add questions to that category
• 3 – add a menu item
• 4 – (optional) create email template

38. Demo time…

39. I did promise a
special bonus

40. For those that didn’t come tonight
• Sorry, you missed out on the special bonus …
you snooze, you lose!

41. Questions?

42. Tim Plummer
www.tamlynsoftware.com
@bfsurvey