80 recipes for building attractive and interactive Joomla! forms

• Develop feature-rich Joomla forms with the help of easy-to-follow steps and ample screenshots
• Publish forms, that let you interact with your users, to a website using ChronoForms in minutes, not in hours
• Explore the versatility of ChronoForms and use them to make your web site an interactive one
• Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible

In Detail

Joomla! is a fantastic way to create a dynamic CMS. Now you want to go to the next step and interact with your users. Forms are the way you ask questions and get replies. ChronoForms is the extension that lets you do that and this book tells you how.

From building your first form to creating rich form based applications we will cover the features that ChronoForms offers you in a clear hands-on way. Drawing on three years daily experience using ChronoForms and supporting users there is valuable help for new users and experienced developers alike.

We will take you through form development step by step: from creating your first form using ChronoForms' built-in drag-and-drop tool, validating user input, emailing the results, saving data in the database, showing the form in your Joomla! site and much more.Each chapter addresses a topic like `validation' or `email' and the recipes in the chapter each address a different user question from the beginners' question `How do I set up an email?' through to more advanced questions like using some PHP to create a custom email Subject line.Over eight chapters and eighty recipes we cover all of the `Frequently Asked Questions' that new users and developers have about using ChronoForms. The recipe structure allows you to pick and choose just the solution that you need.

This practical book, packed with easy-to-flow recipes, tips, and tricks, will help you add interactive forms to your sites with the ChronoForms

What you will learn from this book

• Create forms using the drag-and drop wizard, HTML from an existing form, or built in Dreamweaver
• Setup emails to send form results to a site admin, or to the user, or anyone else
• Change the look and feel of your form to match your site
• Save your form data in the Joomla database and export it again
• Set up form validation and security
• Display your form in its own page, in an article, a module or a light box
• Add file uploads to your form, validate the file type, save files on your site, attach them to emails, re-size image files and display them in emails or article
• Create common types of form: newsletter sign-up, custom `contact us', image upload, PayPal purchase, Joomla registration, and more
• Use ChronoForms plugins to enhance your forms: control access, send information to other sites, multi-lingual forms, multi-page forms
• Develop more advanced features: send an SMS, add a bar code in the email, using Ajax to check email addresses, adding conversion tracking scripts

Approach

This book is the missing manual for creating forms on your Joomla! site. Using simple examples that you can easily follow we will show you how you can create forms of almost any kind. Most of the chapters focus on one topic starting with simple recipes for new users and then adding new features that add more to the form but may also require more knowledge and experience to implement.Other chapters look in more detail at adding special features, or creating forms to perform particular tasks. Again the recipes range from those that a new user can easily implement to those that will help more advanced developers. Each recipe is kept as simple as possible and set out so that it can be easily implemented with the code supplied, and the recipes are also a set of building blocks that you can use to create much more complex forms using several recipes to build your form. As far as space allows we have explained how the code works, what features of Joomla or of ChronoForms we are using and we've offered suggestions in the `There's more . . .' sections for ways in which the basic recipe can be extended or adapted.The code examples are complete and can be adapted by new users with the minimum of customization or they can be as a starting point for developers with more coding experience to build on and adapt to create fully customized form applications.

Who this book is written for

This is a practical hands-on book for people who want to add forms to their Joomla! site. Whether you just want to add a simple newsletter sign-up form or a complex multi-page interactive form you'll find helpful suggestions and recipes that will get your forms working. Many recipes will work `out-of-the-box' using ChronoForms built-in capabilities, other more advanced recipes require some knowledge of Joomla!, HTML, CSS ,PHP, MySQL or JavaScript. There is working code with each recipe that you can adapt to meet your specific needs.