Appnitro Software Forums » MachForm

Using a third party form processor?

(6 posts)
  • Started 2 months ago by marconey
  • Latest reply from Saghalie

  1. marconey
    Member

    Hi everyone, hi Yuniar,
    Is it possible to use an external forms processor with MachForms? If yes, how difficult a task is this? (please be as detailed as possible)
    The reason I ask is this: It's next to impossible to find anything out there that can match the elegance and value of MachForms. (That elegance part is really dear to esp. Mac users :o)). But at the same time since MachForm does not yet enable creation of multipage forms with skip/branch or conditional branching, is it possible to use third party form processors to get over that shortcoming? Moreover, I'd also like to maintain the look and feel (layout) of the email response (received by the form owner after a user submits the form with the data). How will this be effected if a third party form processor is used? (sorry for my lack of understanding of the entire process in detail).

    Thanks,
    Kenny

    Posted 2 months ago #

  2. yuniar
    MachForm Founder

    Hi Ken,

    Hmm.. I think you ask the question to the wrong person.

    You should ask this to the "external form processor" ;-) Are they able to use the form template provided by MachForm?

    Posted 2 months ago #

  3. marconey
    Member

    Thanks Yuniar. The external processor says that their script works with any form produced with any HTML editor. In other words I create the form the way I want and then point the Action attribute to the script for processing. My other concern is that what happens at that point? data collection is handled by THAT script which also means that presentation of the data collected (which is presented very neatly in MachForm in a tabular format) is also handled by that script.

    Assuming the above statements by the external processor are true, is it possible to retain the look and feel and functionality of the collected data even after having the form processed by the external processor? What does this involve?

    Thanks,
    Ken

    Posted 2 months ago #

  4. yuniar
    MachForm Founder

    If the data collection is handled by third party script, then the presentation of the data collected is also handled by that script.

    I'm afraid you won't be able to use any of MachForm functionality other than generating the form template.

    If you would like to retain the look and feel of the collected data, you need to adjust that script too. Depends on the complexity of the script, the steps involved could be simple or complex.

    Posted 2 months ago #

  5. AMurray
    Pro Member

    Try out www.phpform.org - it's the "lite" version of Machform (form editor part only). It creates the HTML code for the form, so you can copy/paste to any site. You just need the back-end processing script.

    Posted 2 months ago #

  6. Saghalie
    Pro Member

    Ken,

    You can create your form within MachForm. When you have it completed to your satisfaction, just view it and then do a view source. Copy or save the code to a new file.

    You will need to make sure you have the CSS file and images that was created with the form in order for it to look nice.

    Compare the links at http://www.beautiful-beginnings.org/facts.html with http://www.beautiful-beginnings.org/index.html (click the newsletter links on both pages)

    AMurray's suggestion is a good one; as well as easier. But I'm trying to show you that you can use the MachForm forms that you create with 3rd party applications. You just can't use them from within MachForm unless you do LOTS of recoding.

    You can look at my newsletter form at http://www.beautiful-beginnings.org/newsletter.php to see a basic example. You'll notice it's a bit broken (I need to fix that!). But its an example of creating the form with MachForm and using a 3rd party app to create the back-end processing script.

    Hope this helps!

    Saghalie
    Kopa mika kopa kloshie tumtum

    Posted 2 months ago #

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