CSS Form Builder Docs

Hi WA Team,

I have gotten a few emails from WebAssist users for help on CSS Form Builder and it seems that perhaps, some more extensive documentation is would be appropriate.

Is there going to be any more documentation or, perhaps, video tutorials in the near future?

Thanks,

Brian

Hey Brian,

We intend to release a new document for CSS Form Builder users that describes the various ways you can use other WebAssist extensions to add functionality to your Form Builder form. This is the only CSS Form Builder documentation planned for the near future.

What we are seeing with Form Builder customers is the need for the form to function after using Form Builder. For example, after creating a contact form with Form Builder, you will need to apply additional behaviors to actually make the form send an email. In this case, you can use Universal Email and reference the documentation for that extension to be successful.

Of course, for those who do not have the other extensions, this would require hand coding and could become quite a cumbersome task.

The alternative approach is to have a functional form to start with, perhaps created by DataAssist or eCart, and customize that form using CSS Form Builder. This way, when you are finished using Form Builder, your form should be ready to go. This has already been documented in the Modifying an existing form with CSS Form Builder How To on the CSS Form Builder Support page: css-form-builder/

If you have other ideas/requests for documentation let us know using the contact form found here:
submit-idea.php

-Neil

Thanks Neil,

I, honestly, have had no trouble with the extension at all... but I also understand some of the intricacies for less advanced users can be problematic. The few people that emailed me were asking me how I created a few of my forms and I think their real issue was grasping the fieldset and then editing the groups where you add lines and elements inside lines, etc.

That was the only area that I thought the documentation was lacking from their point of view. It appears that there could be some more detail in both creating the form elements correctly (because you can actually create elements at the fieldset level but it doesn't perform correctly, as opposed at the group level with lines and sets) and the styling of form elements.

For me, like I said, it all is great but I probably get a handle on these things quicker than many other typical users.

Great product, though. Keep up the good work.

Best regards,

Brian

Hi,
I finally got a chance to dig around in the form builder recently, and I agree that it is not completely intuitive to use. It took me quite a while to just figure out how to reduce the height of each text field.

One thing I noticed is that there is no way to specify the field name (and id). It appears to be auto generated by the text you enter for the label content, along with the form type.

This causes several problems. One is that if I use the page to do something like send an email, or insert into a database, and I change the form name later, it seems to change all the field names, thus making the variables I used in the database insert, or email not work any more.

Also, it makes many autofill (like google autofill) not work, since they are looking for common field names like first_name and last_name, email, phone etc.

It also can make extremely long field name, and class names, which make the code unwieldy.

Or perhaps I just missed something somewhere.

Thanks!

Tom

That is true. Form names are auto-generated and require a find/replace to update later, which causes you to not be able to use the form builder for editing.

Really you should use the form builder to build the form and hand edit, since it does a better job of building than it does editing to begin with. The "edit" feature is reall a "rebuild".

If you want to create a form with your own form element names, you can create a simple form by hand that is properly named, then open the form builder with that form highlighted. That will cause the form builder to use the form names from your form.

We will probably need to add a feature to edit form names in the next version because so many people have requested it. Thanks for the feedback.