Integrating forms into front-end of site (not managed content)

[tobinesmith]

Hi all,

Does this documentation still apply for creating custom front-end forms for a FarCry 7 project? https://farcry.jira.com/wiki/display/FCDEV60/UNIT+10+-+Building+Forms

Is there a more detailed walk-through for creating front-end forms specifically?

Thanks!

[modius]

Formtools are great for front end forms… Most of the time

What CSS framework are you working with? If it’s bootstrap 2 or something that works with uni-form things should be straightforward.

(Chelsea Boots project is Bootstrap 2)

[tobinesmith]

Thanks! I changed the post title because it was misleading. I don’t have any trouble creating or processing forms in ColdFusion; in fact I want to use CF my CF code. What I am looking for is a walk-through on how to integrate a form into the front-end of a site and do pre- and post-processing.

[modius]

What I am looking for is a walk-through on how to integrate a form into the front-end of a site and do pre- and post-processing.

I put together a little HowTo on putting CFML/HTML forms into the tree. Hope that helps

Includes: Non-FarCry Forms in FarCry

There are many ways this cat can be skinned. That said, we don’t specifically cater for non-formtools based forms in FarCry. You can use just about any technique that gives you a random block of HTML markup on a page. (Note if you are working with forms in general, the FarCry formtool engine is really very cool for this sort of thing, but I’ll leave that for another post) I’m assuming this is a self-calling, HTML form using some ColdFusion code for form processing, and that it needs to be pr…

[seancoyne]

FWIW, we use Rules for this rather than includes. For us, this has a number of added benefits.

First, we can add configuration options using rules. For forms, things like who should be emailed when the form is completed, how the form should be constructed (options for dropdowns, etc) things like that can be configured by the user adding the rule to the page.

Second, content editors don’t need to learn about includes. They already know rules and can easily reuse forms all over the site. For example, we have a contact us form that is used on several different “department” pages. The rule allows it to be configured specifically for that department, but we only have 1 rule to manage from a maintenance standpoint.

Third, we can put the forms in HTML pages which are more easily indexed by the search engine and it allows us to place the form after some introductory HTML or otherwise embed them into the page.

Last, instead of stuffing the view, logic, etc all into an include .cfm file we can put the logic into the rule’s CFC, the view HTML into the view webskins and keep that separated somewhat. Sure, with an include you could create your own CFCs for logic, but this saves that step since the rule requires a CFC to be created anyway.

Includes are great when necessary but we almost never use them and find rules to be a better option in almost every case.

[tobinesmith]

You guys are awesome! Thanks a lot; got it working. I didn’t use rules, but I did include CFCs for a slightly kludgy MVC design. I’ll look into rules some more.