Joomla Forms – Preview – Submissions Manager
(Sorry this post is late!)
Continuing our series on previewing Joomal Forms features, we are pleased to introduce you to the submissions manager (Ok there is not a lot to see but its there 
).
If you add the “Save” Form action while creating your form, Joomla Forms will save a copy of every form submission into a special database. You can view this information, sort it by columns and filter the data to create your own views. Furthermore using the export options you can even export all of the form submission so you can manipulate it on your own desktop!
The Submissions manager is evolving into more though…. watch this space for daily blog updates on new features added…
Tomorrows post is entitled “Why Joomla Forms Doesn’t Use CAPTCHA” – Stay Tuned!
Joomla Forms – Preview – Export Options
Continuing our look at the features of Joomla Forms, we are pleased to show that Form Submissions in Joomla Forms can now be extracted from the database in several ways.
Currently we have options for exporting the data to XML format and CSV format – two of the most useable and compatible formats for exchanging data between different applications and suported by all good applications!
We even have the options to backup your form’s configuration, form field configs and actions configurations to XML file so that you can restore or move forms between your sites easily without having to recreate them!
This, coupled with the built in submissions manager (see tomorrows post) we think will make managing your submissions a breeze
Joomla Forms – Preview – Unit Testing and Quality Code
[Thanks to ex-employee Greg Wright for getting me in the spirit of Test Driven Development]
While developing Joomla Forms over the last 1+ years many changes to Joomla 1.5 have taken place. Infact when we started development on Joomla Forms, Joomla 1.5 was still very much in development with huge changes being made daily.
Keeping on top of what worked and what didn’t was a huge job – so much so that I gave up
A lot has been said about Unit Testing in recent months by Joomla Core Developers and even custom developers. However we have been employing unit testing heavily for Joomla Forms, and have been employing (mainly in the later stages) the principles of test-driven development to ensure that our code for Joomla Forms is reusable, free of silly mistakes and more importantly WORKS!
The screenshot that you can see here is the 359 Assertions we are making of the Form Field Plugins in Joomla Forms. We have many more unit tests covering 89% of the component and bfFramework – thats pretty good.
What does this mean for you?
- Cleaner, more reliable code
- Mistakes are caught early in the development process
- Code is clearly documented in tests
- Refactoring/Changes can be tested quickly to see if it impacts elsewhere
- Quality code is tested code
Just a small insight on what we do behind the scenes – further reading:
- PHPUnit (The FREE Book)
- Unit Testing on wikipedia
- Test Driven Development
Joomla Forms – Preview – Standards Compliant
Continuing our look at the features of Joomla Forms, we are pleased to announce that Joomla Forms is 100% xHTML Compliant and passes the W3C Markup Validation.
This is important for sites that are concerned with this type of validation, and also shows our commitment to producing quality output from our components. We are working hard on getting the CSS compliant (We use a couple of CSS3 attributes at the moment which only render in Firefox and not MS IE7 – we will resolve that before release I am sure)
Joomla Forms – First Pubic Preview
Ok, so we are getting excited and have shared this with a few people to test and it works well
So today we are making the following URL public:
Joomla Forms – http://www.phil-taylor.com/Joomla_Forms_Test
The above URL goes to a form that is powered by the upcoming Joomla Component – Joomla Forms!
Please go and play with the form, you will see the validation rules working, the way you can preview a submission, and when you submit the form the results will be GPG Encrypted and sent to our address and yours so you can see the secure nature of the encryption (Of course you will not be able to decrypt the email, as its encypted using our GPG Public key – but once you have Joomla Forms on your site, you can use your own GPG public key )
This is the killer Joomla Extension that 1000′s of you have been waiting for, and I wanted to show you that its not vapourware, but close to reality! (PLEASE dont ask for a release date – we dont have one and will not tell you any date until we ourselves have set one!)
Joomla Forms – Preview – Field Validation Rules
We are getting ever closer to releasing our flagship new product – Joomla Forms, the Form generator and processor for Joomla 1.0.x AND Joomla 1.5.x
One of the best features of Joomla Forms is the new validation rules, currently these are 22 validators (More added daily at the moment!) ranging from the basic ones (Required) to more complex ones (Must match Regex).
All the validation rules are processed in PHP and not Javascript, meaning that it is impossible to submit the form without passing the validations set by the form creator. Javascript based validations can be easily bypassed by spammers thats why we have chosen to write ours in the PHP model.
Most of the validation rules are simple to configure, requiring nothing more than clicking the Yes radio box to enable them – really simple – mightly powerful!
Click here to see a preview of some of the validation options in Joomla Forms today.
Coming Soon – Joomla Forms – The Next Generation Forms Extension for Joomla 1.5 !