About Visforms
Do you want to use individual forms on your Joomla website? Great, but there are a few things you should know about visforms and forms first.
Why a form component for Joomla
Forms are an important element through which users of a website can interact with its operators. Forms create the possibility of transmitting user-specific information.
HTML is the language in which websites are written. It therefore introduced a whole series of so-called “controls” for user input early on. These include list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and text inputs. In conjunction with the enclosing HTML element form, these controls are the building blocks from which forms are created.
Unfortunately, the nomenclature of the controls is sometimes quite illogical and inconsistent. It usually requires programming experience in both HTML and PHP to put these controls together into a working form. This makes it difficult for beginners to create their own forms.
The idea behind Visforms was to develop a Joomla component in which you can create completely individual forms without any programming knowledge. Simply by “clicking together” the desired controls in a user interface. The controls are called “fields” in Visforms. Both the form and the associated fields are created in the Joomla backend via the Joomla user interface.
Create clearly structured forms and controls in the Joomla backend
All options that HTML offers when creating forms are packaged in easily understandable and well-explained Visforms parameters. The form and its fields can therefore be controlled very easily by you. All existing standard HTML controls can be created as form fields.
Each form and each form field is stored in its own record. Standard functionalities such as changing the order of form fields or copying forms and fields using batch processing are available, as are differentiated access authorizations and complete support for multiple languages.
Individual control of form validation
When you write the code for a form yourself, you spend about as much time making sure the user can enter only valid data as you do developing the form itself. Visforms supports itself
- Validation of mandatory fields,
- Validation of all important input formats (like email, URL, number, date),
- the minimum/maximum length of text inputs and
- smallest and largest value for numbers.
Furthermore, you can
- Check user input for uniqueness or
- require an entry to be repeated in a second field.
Custom validation allows advanced users to define custom validation rules using so-called “regular expressions”. Which field is to be validated according to which criteria can be easily configured using the field parameters.
Instead of the default error message, an individual error message can also be stored for each field.
Effective user-friendly protection against spam
Most forms use so-called captchas to protect forms from spambots. These are images with difficult-to-decipher character strings that must be entered correctly in a designated field. The form can only be sent after correct input. Visforms supports both the Google recaptcha favored by Joomla and a slightly easier to decipher own captcha.
The use of captchas as spam protection is not without controversy and also has disadvantages. Users are often annoyed by this, especially when the character string is very difficult to decipher.
That’s why Visforms offers an alternative way to prevent spamming via forms. With the Visforms alternative, no captchas need to be entered. You will not find anything comparable in any other Joomla form component.
Visforms comes with its own spam protection plugin. The plugin uses online spambot databases that provide constantly updated lists of spambots. The plugin checks whether the IP and, if available, the email address of the sender of the form are listed in such a spambot database. If so, the form submission is aborted. Spam via Visforms forms can be almost completely prevented by the plugin alone and without the use of captchas.
Other interesting features
Fields can be automatically pre-filled. For example with user data of the currently logged-in user or with data that is transferred via URL parameters.
You can configure emails individually for the user and the website operator. You can specify whether the transmitted data should be saved in the database.
Stored data can be individually controlled and exported to a CSV format.
Saved data can be published in the frontend using a menu.
Again, there are many parameters to control what data is published, when, and how.
Note: Visforms uses the Joomla Autoupdater so that you are automatically informed about Visforms updates in the backend of your website.
With the “Visforms Module” you can publish forms flexibly in module positions on the content pages of your website. Here, Visforms still works without errors if you display more than one form on a page.
An upgrade to a Pro version, the Visforms Subscription with useful additional features for advanced requirements, is easily possible at any time.
More about this in: Visforms Subscription Abo Levels.
The Visforms Subscription includes e.g.
- advanced email configuration,
- editing saved data in the frontend,
- Advanced layout options like multi-page forms, accordion layout, Bootstrap 3 support and
- additional field types such as calculation, location/map and signature.
More about this in: Visforms Subscription Features.
Visforms works as much as possible with the Joomla Framework functionality and its functions. Visforms uses the standard Joomla JavaScript libraries in “noconflict” mode, and it respects the Joomla coding standards. More on this in: Joomla Coding Standards.
Outlook
Visforms is continuously developed and improved. We investigate every bug report you send us and fix bugs in Visforms as soon as possible. In addition, we accept many requests for the further development of Visforms in our “Feature Request” list. We will implement our “Feature Request” list as quickly as possible within our time budget.