How to use the Form Manager in the Reflex Content Management System

The form manager within the Reflex Content Management System enables full user control over the online forms on the website.

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Enquiry and ‘contact us’ forms play an important role in how an online business interacts with its customers. The Form Manager recognises this and provides a simple interface allowing the user to easily create new forms and update existing ones.

To make this process as straightforward and undemanding as possible, the Form Manager contains many unique features. These include:
•    Easy-to-use drop-down menus
•    Clear on-screen instructions
•    Simple customisation of ‘submit’ button, form name, post form text etc...
•    Preview forms as they are built
•    Add, remove and update form fields
•    Choose where form results go and how they are presented with the click of a button

These features are unique to Reflex and help to make it a simple yet highly powerful and effective content management system. Within this system the Form Manager plays an important role and provides many benefits to the user, such as:
•    Complete control over how your customers interact with you
•    Reducing disruption and inconvenience to customers by making changes quickly and easily
•    Control over how the form data is presented to you
•    Ending reliance on technical staff

Like all the tools within the Reflex Content Management System, the Form Manager is extremely easy-to-use as well as highly powerful.

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In the first section of the Form Manager you can use the drop-down menus to choose what sort of form you would like to create/edit (e.g. contact us form) and the form display style. The form style controls the look of the form and refers to the HTML which is created for the form. This should usually be set as a 1 column table, as 2 column tables often do not fit on the page.

Here you can also specify what text to display on the ‘submit’ button, which can be anything you like – although it is probably best if this is something obvious and boring like ‘Submit Form’ or ‘Enter’. Beneath this is a text field for you to enter your own ‘Post Form Text’, which is the text that will be displayed after the form is completed. Again, it is entirely up to you what to include in this message.

The ‘Form Results’ menu lets you choose how you would like to receive the results of the form. The two most popular methods are to receive the results in an instant email, or to automatically populate a database with the form data. If you wish to receive the results in an email you can simply add your email address and all the forms completed by your customers will be emailed directly to you.

You will notice on the above example the ‘Form Preview’ box, this lets you view the form as you modify it so you can see what effect your changes will make to the finished form.

The Field Manager section of this tool allows you to customise all the fields within your form. This provides you with complete control over what data you are requesting as well as how you want the customer to enter it.

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After selecting the correct form in the ‘Forms Available’ menu, you will see a full list of all the fields within that form. There are also options to ‘Create New’ ones and ‘Delete’ old ones.

The ‘Field Details’ on the right-hand side is where you can edit the selected (highlighted) field. Here you can change the name and title of the field and choose whether the field is a required field that your customer must fill in. There are two drop-down menus that let you select whether this field is always displayed within the form and what type of field it is. The Form Manager creates forms that can incorporate lots of different types of field, from simple text entry fields (i.e. ‘enter your name’) to check boxes and drop-down menus.

Depending on what type of field you require, the section below the ‘Type’ menu will change. The above example shows a text field, with the options being to determine the width of the box and how many characters of text can be input.

If you would like to change the order that the fields are displayed on the form then you can simply select a field in the menu and drag it into its new position. It will then be displayed on your website in that position.