Hi
I wonder if someone can steer me in the right direction for this. I realise that it might mean more work than simply dragging some form stacks around but exactly what I don’t really know.
I’d like to automate a clients enquiry for counselling services so that depending on what is ticked depends on who receives the email enquiry.
Also, after submission it needs to display a personalised page such as
“Hi Jeff, thanks for your enquiry. Looking at your form I think Julie is the right therapist for you as she specialises in Banana phobia. Would you like to book a free telephone appointment? (link) or would you like to get started and book a face to face session (link).
Is this something that requires more than Stacks?
I’m assuming so.
Normally I use MachForms for all my contact form/data collection needs and I could not be happier with it.
However… a few times now I have been asked to set up something like what you have described. The solution was to use SkyForms Pro + Jquery + PHP and hand code it. Sky Forms Pro is fabulous and available here: http://voky.com.ua/showcase/sky-forms-pro/
Those situations required values provided in the form to be picked out and used in subsequent parts of the form to, increasingly, personalise the messages and ultimately send the form to a specific recipient.
Not aware of any stacks based solutions for this kind of scenario, though I’m happy to stand corrected. If you are really stuck I could maybe put together a demo of sorts for you.
Sounds perfect.
We’ll make a workflow of how we want it to go and get it started in Sky Forms Pro.
It’s the next part of using Jquery and PHP that might need a helping hand!
I’ll let you know
Thanks
Richard
Sure…good luck. Of course there is no specific need to use Sky Forms Pro (thats just the html/css part), I just chose it because a) its a quality product with an extremely consistent and extensible html structure and b) Its always been possible to get a highly satisfactory visual effect which works with the design for the site.
Its very simple, for example, to make a form which is in lets say, three pieces. Piece two and three can be hidden and only fade into view (perhaps revealing the final ‘submit’ button) after certain conditions are met, fields filled out and validated. That kind of thing. Then, because you have full control over what gets passed to the back-end PHP you can send what you like, where you like. I can make no assertions however about whether your host will permit processing to certain email addresses/domains etc as it seems many of them make a right old industry for themselves out of dictating what you can and can’t do.
Thanks Stuart
Am I right in thinking that a 3rd party framework has more flexibility than Formloom / Formsnap?
Could a stack based form even be able to pass info to the back-end PHP?
I’m a big fan of stack based forms, but one advantage of rolling your own using a framework is the sense of complete control over each and every element. I quite like that.
stacks based forms DO pass information to back end PHP scripts (those PHP scripts were included in the stack). Thats how most stacks forms work. Just because we are using RapidWeaver and Stacks the underlying technology and frameworks don’t change. RW and Stacks (and stacks) are just layers which abstract the user away from how stuff actually does work. Form based stacks include packaged PHP files which get published to the host (when you publish the page) those scripts are then available and ‘call-able’ from the UI components you put on the page when you customised the stack.
The HTML stack is, in my view, the most powerful stack in the library as it allows you to poke a hole right through RW and Stacks itself and do other things.
