Forms and creation

Making sites with Designer Pro X is great, and it is just about perfect for basic - ish- ones and they look great and are pretty much as functional as 99% of people and small to medium business need, but is there any way to create and generate forms in this programme apart from the widgets? The widgets are fine if you just want to make a basic contact form or other, but if you want to create a decent form with a link back to a success page or Paypal payment page, or whatever on your site, you have to pay a fair sum to have that kind of fairly basic functionality....I've been doing it for more than a decade in a VERY old version of MS Frontpage, so surely Xara, at least in the Designer Pro X version in 2013 must be able to include it? If I had to pay $9.95 a month for this basic form function I might as well buy a different programme to Xara and just have the basic drawing programme.

Or am I missing something?

Failing ALL the above...which is the best widget as I don't want to register with them all and create form sin them all.

There is no way to create a form in DPX.

JotForm is what I have used. There are a few draw backs but basically I like it a lot.

You have a couple of choices. Either put the HTML code for the form you've coded in a placeholder, use one of the form widgets within the Designs Gallery, or use a different form widget provider not included in the Designs Gallery and put the code they provide you with in a placeholder manually.

Personally I like JotForm and Form2Go because you can create your own form, decide what fields you want as well as other customisations.

JotForm have 3 tiers of account. Free account without registration, free account with registration, and a paid account. I can't recall what all the differences are between the account tiers but their website will tell you. But I'm quite sure in the free without registration account you can specify the URL to go to after submitting the form.

Can't recall off hand the account tiers for Form2Go, it may be a free account with registration and a paid account. They have a lot of features and functionality in their forms as well.

Thanks for the info, but it seems a great shame that a programme that is 12 years old, and wasn't that good to start with, should have this kind of functionality and my fancy all singing and dancing Xara product doesn't.

Have a word with them please Gary :-)

Pete is the one to talk to them, actually.

Xara's thinking is why reinvent the wheel. If there are persons/companies who have products and utilities that do these thing then just make the ability to add these forms available the let the user pick the best solution.

NetObjects Fusion has had a form creation tool for years, but I only used it once or twice because it was very obscure and not easy to implement. I prefer the ability to create and use my own form. But you may differ and this is what makes life so interesting. :)

I just tried Form2Go and I like it even better than JotForm. Thanks Pete.

Hi All,

I also used a external e-mail form provider, but I was not satisfied with it. I'm am now testing with a php form that I found on the internet. From a page within Designer Pro X you can link to the php page. The page requires only that you fill in an e-mail address. The hosting provider where I store the site supports PHP, i dont't have to configure anything. The only thing I want to try is to see if it's posible to integrate the php form into a page. Maybe with a placeholder. Then I can improve the page by setting the font and background, etc. Maybe it's something to try out. I'll attach the php form if this is posible.

Regards,
Frits

frits - Is there an embed code created when you create the form? If so, add the embed code to a placeholder that is the same size as the form.

Hi Gary,

I did not generate the form. I found it on a php site and downloaded it. t's as is. I'll try to put it in a placeholder to see what happens.

Regards,
Frits

If you insert PHP code into a page, you'll also need to make sure the page is exported with a .php file extension.

On the page you insert this placeholder on go to Utilities > Web Properties > Page tab and append .php to the filename.

Note that the first page of the website document MUST AND WILL ALWAYS be exported with a .htm or .html file extension, so if you want your hhomepage to have a .php file extension then create a mock index page as the first page in your website, then create the index.php page as the second page.

Stewart. I use this one and found it very comprehensive in making forms: http://phpfmg.sourceforge.net/

Easy to use even for quite complex forms with drop down menus etc(or as simple as you want). Once produced the files are all downloadable to your site folder with the code to place in the place holder. Only problem you may have is if you rely on xara to upload the site it may not do the form files. As I alwayss upload via filezilla it isn't a problem. Simple and efficient.

Ken
p.s you cam have as many forms on a page as you want.

Thanks Ken, I'll give that a go.

While I agree with you to a point Gary, I find it strange that Xara wants other companies to do their fiddly bits for them. I actually don't want Xara to reinvent the wheel, just to include it on the car they are selling me and not sending me with a chassis only, propped up on bricks on a lowloader, to go and get the wheels from somebody else...but they did very kindly give me a bunch of addresses for people who could supply them :-)

I would like my software to be integrated with the 'option' of widgets, not driven by them.

Jotform or Forms2go, or PHP then...or maybe invest in other web authoring software and no payments to external widget companies....we'll see.