Heads Up: This is the documentation for Joomla 3

We recommend using the Documentation for Joomla 5

It is more up-to-date and extensive. Most of it applies retrospectively to Joomla 3.

Joomla 5 Notice

We are pleased to announce that as of January 29, 2024, all of our Joomla extensions are compatible with Joomla 5.

For all who are still updateing from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4: Joomla 4 Migration instructions are available here:

There is now a separate Documentation for Visforms for Joomla 4 and for Visforms for Joomla 5!

Using User Inputs in Result Text and E-Mails

Visforms allows you to add placeholders to the "E-mail result text", the "E-mail receipt text" the e-mail subjects and to the "Result text", which are replaced with the submitted user input before the mail is send or the message is displayed. This is a powerful feature, because

  • you can highly individualize the texts according to your requirements
  • you can customize the layout of the e-mails individually including the display ot the sumitted data

Basics

We use textareas to enter long texts (like the "E-mail receipt text"). To allow you to give more or less format to this texts without (much) knowledge of HTML, Joomla! provides you with a so called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. By default this WYSIWYG editor is TinyMCE. Editors are Joomla! plugins of the plugin type "editor", which can be enable or disable in the administrator panels Plugin Manager. In addition to the TinyMCE editor plugin Joomla! has two more default editors plugins, the Code Mirror and the None. Other editors are available as third party extensions.

For your Joomla! installation to work properly you must always enable at least one editor plugin! But you can enable as many editor plugins as you like. You set a default editor in the global configuration of your Joomla! installation. According to your settings in the user mananger options, users may be able to choose a different editor as their own default editor. If you do not want to use a WYSIWYG editor you have to enable the "None" editor and choose it as default.

Further on Joomla! provides you with so called editor buttons. These are for example buttons like the "Article"-Button or the "Image"-Button which you can use, to easily insert images or links into articles, by selecting the item in a popup window with the mouse. Editor buttons are Joomla! plugins, too. They are of the type "editor-xtd". Usually the buttons work fine with all editors, but when you have more than one editor field at a time, the buttons only work as expected with the TinyMCE editor but not with Code Mirror or None or third party editor plugins like JCE. Therefore please make sure, that the TinyMCE editor plugin and the editor-xtd plugin "Button - Visformfields" are enabled.

Inserting Placeholder

Visforms comes with a custom editor button Visformfields which is availiable for the E-mail receipt text, the E-Mail result text and the Result Text in the Edit form view.This button works similiar to the article or image button. A click on that button opens a popup with a list of all field and overhead placeholders that are available for the form, which you currently edit. Just click on the field title/placeholder name and the placeholder is inserted into the respective text at the current cursor position.

The edit form view contains several editor fields. As we have learned above in this case editor buttons only work properly with the TinyMCE editor. Therefore Visforms tries to enforce the use of the TinyMCE editor in the edit form view. If the TinyMCE editor plugin is disable on your Joomla! installation for any reason, the editor buttons will not be displayed!

Insert Placeholder manually

If you want to use user inputs in the e-mail texts or the result message and have disable the TinyMCE plugin for any reason, you can add placeholders manually. Just enter the string [FIELDNAME], where "FIELDNAME" is the name of the field you want to be replaced.You must replace all lower case characters in the field name with upper case characters! Please note, that fields of type Submit Button, Image Submit Button, Reset Button and Field Separator can not be used as placeholders. If you misstype a fieldname or use one of the former field types, the placeholder is just removed. Please note, if a form field has no user input, which may happen for field which are not required, then the placeholder is just removed. So consider carefully which fields you have to set as required.

Make E-Mails Look Pretty

You can create pretty individual e-mails with this feature.

  • Disable the "Include Data" Option
  • Create an individual list to display the user inputs anywhere inside the e-mail text, using placeholders
  • So you can determine the field order
  • You can omit specific fields if you like
  • You can create individual labels
  • You can use the editor to format the output as list, as table or just as you would like it to look like

Note: If you have enabled the Show a download link option for the receipt mail the placeholder for fields of type upload will be replaced by a download link otherwise by the original name of the uploaded file.

Placeholders in Text Result

Visforms allows you to create a custom message, which is displayed after the form was submitted successfully (See also: What happens, after the form is submitted?. Adding placeholder, which are replaced with the user inputs, works similar for this result message except for fields of type upload where the placeholder will always be replaced with the original name of the uploaded file.

Placehoders in Mail Subjects

You can use placehoders in the "Subject" Options of the mails as well. You have to enter the placeholder manually, there, as described above.

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