About Visforms
You like to have individual forms on your website? Fine, but there are some thing you should know about forms and Visforms first.
Why a form extension for Joomla!
Forms are an important means for your customers to get in contact with you, because they allow them to submit information to you.
Therefore HTML, the language used for websites, has included so called "controls" like selects, checkboxes, radios and inputs, which, in connection with the HTLM "form"-tag can be used to create forms.
Sadly, creating forms is not quite straight forewards and it usually requires a good deals of experience in both - HTML and PHP - to create a working form. Thus especially beginners do have problems with that.
The idea of Visforms is, to provide a Joomla! extension which allows you to create customized forms without knowledge in coding. Standard HTML controls (they are called fields in Visforms) can be set up in the components backend through configuration so that forms and fields are easily created via the Joomla! administration.
Create forms and controls with a well structured user interface in the Joomla! backend
Every option HMTL provides for the form element is converted into form and field configuration options that are easy to understand. More over, every option is explained in detail, so that it is easy for you to control what your form looks like and what it does. There is a field type for each standard HTML form control.
Every form and every field is stored as a single recordset in your database. Joomla! standard features like changing the order of recordsets or using batch procedures for copying forms and fields are available as well as access control and multi language support.
Individual validation of user inputs
If you are going to implement the code for a form you will spent almost as much time on making sure that your customer will provide valid data as you will spent time on setting up the form itself. Visforms supports validation of required fields as well as validation of standard input formats (e-mail, URL, number, date). You can set a minimum and a maximum lenght for text inputs or lowest or highest value for numbers. You can require that a user input is unique or that the user input made in one field is repeated in another field (i.e. to prevent typos in an e-mail address). Experienced users can set up custom validation rules (using regular expressions). Which field is to be validated by which rules is easily set up via field cofiguration options.
You can attach a custom error message which will then be used instead of the default error message.
Effectiv, customer friendly spam protection
Most forms us Captchas, difficult to read characters which have to be typed in correctly, in order to protect themselfes against spambots. Visforms supports two types of Captchas, the Google Recaptcha and a Viscaptcha, which is easier to read.
Captchas are not undisputed, because they often annoy real customers. This is why Visforms has a unique alternative to offer, which you will not find at any other form component and which prevents spambots from submitting your form without any obstacles for your users. Visforms has it's own spam protection plugin.
There are multiple online spambot databases, which provide good information about current spambots. When a form is submitted, the plugin checks if the IP or the e-mail address of the originator is listed in one of these databases and thus prevents spambot submissions. Using this plugin, without any Captchas is going to stop almost any spam.
Other Settings
You can prepopulate form fields with default values, for example with user data of the currently logged on user or with values passed by url parameters.
You can send a result mail (to yourself) and recipient mail (to the user of your website). Mails can be set up individually and you can save submitted data in database if you wish.
Saved data can be exported into a CSV format.
Saved data can be published in frontend; there are lots of options to control which data are published.
Visforms supports Joomla! autoupdater, so you will be automatically informed about updates in the administration of your website.
Visforms provides a module to display forms in module positions. Visforms will work properly even if you have more than one Visforms form module on one page.
You can upgrade easily to a pro version (the Visforms Subscription) which provides useful features for advanced uses like additional e-mail settings, frontend edit of stored user inputs, multi page forms, accordion layout, Bootstrap 3 layouts and additional field types like calculation, location/map and signature
Visforms is highly integrated into Joomla! and uses Joomla! framework functions as far as possible. It uses default Joomla! Javascript librairies in noconflict mode and respects Joomla! coding standards
Prospects
Visforms is continously maintained, improved and developed. We take your bug reports seriously and fix errors as fast as possible. We are open for "feature requests" and try to implement sensible new features as fast as our time budget allows.