Formloom 3 - a couple of starter questions

[robbeattie]

I’m employing Formloom 3 on a site and it’s looking pretty good but I have a couple of questions.

1. In the Formloom settings panel there’s an option to include a ‘From Email’ address. What’s this for? Surely each email that’s received when someone fills in the form will include their email address as the ‘from’ address?

2. I’m using the Formloom3 remote stack to pull the form into a Stacks page but while the other elements on the page (a heading, some intro text and the sidebar) appear fine in preview, they’re missing from the published page.

3. Am I right in thinking that both the Formloom 3 page and the Stacks page I’m inserting it into have to .php pages?

The page is on a test site at www.fisherofmen.co.uk/Contact

Thanks,

Rob

[Turtle (Brad Halstead)]

Hi Rob @robbeattie

Manual available here…

From field is for your sending email address (no-reply@rob.com) as an example

I haven’t used the remote stack mostly because I don’t have a domain yet (ChilliDog here I come…), but the manual says it won’t preview in RW and there are some specific settings to be made.

I believe both would be PHP pages, RW should automatically change these no?

Brad

[robbeattie]

Cheers Brad.

I still don’t get what the from field is for. When you say ‘sending email address’ what do you mean? The address the form needs to be sent to? Please feel free to treat me like an idiot with your explanation.

Yes, the remote stack doesn’t preview but the other elements on the page do in RW Preview. However, when you look at the page on the test site, the form is there but the other elements are not. I’m going to try a re-publish.

[Turtle (Brad Halstead)]

Hi Rob @robbeattie

From the manual… Does this help clarify? You can put it into debug mode and try to figure out what, if anything, is wrong with your configuration. Also, be aware, it may not work in some themes (perhaps Screens as an example but should work fine in Foundations, etc) but I have not tested it in anything other than locally with MAMP and the Sidebar Theme. If you’re having a theme issue, try a different theme and see if that makes a difference.

From Email
Enter the email address you’d like the form to be sent FROM - NOTE: Many hosts require the FROM address on email sent through their servers to match an actual account that exists on their network. If you’re having trouble with forms not getting emailed, try entering a valid email address that exists on your host (ie, don’t use an @gmail.com address as the from address on your @yourdomain.com form)

Reply Email
The reply-to address on an email can be different than the FROM address, which is handy in cases where your host requires the form to be sent FROM an address associated with YOUR domain but you’d like replies to go directly to the sender. Select an email address on your form as the Reply-to address. This way your replies go directly to the person that submitted the form.

RE: The stack…

Formloom3 Remote Stack

In the past, there have been various third party products used to place Formloom forms in other page types. Some worked better than others. Ultimately we felt it was best to give users the ease of building a plugin based page, then placing their complete form onto a stacks page. The Formloom3 Remote stack serves just this purpose. Here’s a rundown of the workflow:

Create your form using the plugin

Go to the Page Inspector -> Settings tab and enable the NO THEME option at the bottom (this prevents theme nav, sidebar, etc from getting pulled into the Stacks page as well)

Remove the Formloom plugin page from site navigation so it’s not also directly available to users (Page Inspector -> General Settings -> Show in Navigation)

Go to your Stacks page. Place the FormLoom3 Remote stack where you’d like to place the form. Be sure to give consideration to how much total width you have available - your Formloom page is responsive and will render in the area available.

The stack has only ONE setting, Set Link. Select this to invoke the page selector tool. Make sure the TYPE is set to Page and select the Formloom page from the Page menu (all pages in your site should be available, make sure you select only the Formloom page)

You will need to publish your page to view the imported Formloom content, it will not work in Preview mode.

[Turtle (Brad Halstead)]

@robbeattie,the website looks nice Rob and it looks like you got the stack working as expected at least from view source it looks that way ;)?

Brad

[robbeattie]

Nah, it’s still not working properly. I’m going to try re-publishing it using a different theme to eliminate that problem.

As far as the from address goes, would it be best to set up an email address with my host called (given my test site) enquiry@fisherofmen.co.uk and use that do you think?

Rob

[Turtle (Brad Halstead)]

@robbeattie

Hey Rob, was at a meeting, sorry for the delay.

From Address MUST be a valid email address on the websites domain. You can use the enquiry email address absolutely, you can even configure it on your host to automatically be forwarded to another account if you wish (but not through the plugin). Think of this as a new email, your email address is the from, the email you send to is the reply address… make sense?

The other address, Reply Email is the email address that the form contents gets sent to, typically the person pushing the submit button. This is available from the dropdown, just leave it set as email or whatever your email field is named on the form.

I’m not understanding what your issue is exactly, your stack is in the contact page correct? It displays perfectly fine for me, I did not submit anything to see if there were errors, but the stack is pulling in the form fields and labels and button just fine from what I see in Safari 9.x But then again, I do not know if there are more fields than are shown either

In the recipients field of the settings pane of the plugin panel, you can add multiple addresses as ‘to’ or ‘cc’ or ‘bcc’ or any combination of them if you need the form contents submitted to more than one person, these addresses can be gmail, domain or anything as long as they are valid.

So, say You build the form as the client, you want your email address associated with your domain to be the from address, you have a customer, their email address is the reply email and is pulled from your form if you request an email address on the form. Say you add robbeattie at gmail dot com in the recipients field as a BCC, the the sender gets a copy, you get a copy at the domain and you get a copy at the gmail account, but the sender only sees the to and from email addresses, not the bcc address.

Brad

[Turtle (Brad Halstead)]

@robbeattie

I completed the form and submitted and received “Your Form was sent successfully ”

I did not receive a copy of the form, to do that, go to the FormLoom 3 plugin page you created and check the “Send Receipt” button if you want the person submitting the form to receive a copy.

Brad

[robbeattie]

Thanks for your help here Brad.

I’ve got two issues.

1. Yes, the form displays fine in the Stacks page but the other elements I’ve added to that same Stacks page - a header, short intro and sidebar as shown in the screenshot) do not appear on the published page. They do appear in RW preview.

2. The form appears to send successfully but nothing ever arrives.

I’m going to pursue problems with Yabdab and my host today and see where I get!

Rob

[robbeattie]

I’ve republished the site using the Split theme. You can see from the attached screenshot how the page is supposed to look, with the heading, intro and sidebar content.

When I use View Source on the site with Ruby, that same content simply isn’t there. I’ll get onto Adam at Elixir and see if he can throw any light.

[Turtle (Brad Halstead)]

@robbeattie

I was gonna say, I have a test site running that works perfectly here

Server config is:
Server Type: Apache
PHP Version: 5.3.28

I can only assume it is a Theme issue…

Good Luck Rob
Brad

[robbeattie]

Cheers Brad. I’ve made progress. The form is now working at http://www.fisherofmen.co.uk/Contact together with the heading, intro and sidebar text.

I’d love to say that my detective skills solved the problem but to be honest, I’m not sure how it happened. I re-published a few times, took away something (Doobox’ mail obfuscation code) and it worked. Interestingly I then re-instated the Doobox code and it still worked.

Now all I need to do is get the receipt to go out. At the moment that’s not working.

So to summarise:

1. It doesn’t seem to be an issue with Ruby and Formloom3
2. It doesn’t seem to be an issue with Doobox’ Securemailtogenerator

So it must be user error! But to be honest, I’ve no idea what changed…

Appreciate the support though.

[Turtle (Brad Halstead)]

@robbeattie

Hi Rob, glad you’re making progress, here is a screenshot of my config of FormLoom 3

I get the receipt (sent to submitter of form) and the copy to me (receiver of form submission)

Is there anything there that is not configured on your settings?

Brad

[robbeattie]

Yup. Hadn’t ticked ‘Send Receipt’. <FX: forehead slap>

So, the final puzzle to solve is how to add a tiny JPG to the receipt email. I’ve tried dragging one in and it displays in RW but doesn’t show up on the receipt. I’ve also tried using

<a href="http://www.fisherofmen.co.uk/Form/crown20.png></a> but that doesn’t work either.

Maybe it’s not possible @yabdab?

Rob

[yabdab]

That is an empty anchor tag to the image, nothing will show up anyway.

try this…

<img src="http://www.fisherofmen.co.uk/Form/crown20.png">

[robbeattie]

Thanks to Brad, then Mike.

It now looks as though it’s all working rather well.

Rob

[Turtle (Brad Halstead)]

@robbeattie <FX: forehead slap> lol - I gotta remember that one, thanks!

A href is for links

As @yabdab said…

or

<a href="http://www.fisherofmen.co.uk"><img src="http://www.fisherofmen.co.uk/Form/crown20.png"></a>

To make the image in the email linked back to website when clicked…

Brad

[frankshockey (Franck Spinozzi)]

Yes hello, but one question where do we write the code? so I cn see the image on the reseipt?

Frank

[jabostick (Jason Bostick)]

There are some tabs that run along the bottom of the plugin. You would put it in the ‘Template’ part of Formloom. This is an old screenshot from an old version (I’m not at my RW computer so I just googled an image) but it’ll give you an idea: