Complex Forms are now Available

Mainly for Home-Starts

I switched over to Contact Form 7 several years ago and am now familiar with several plugins which extend the functionality, particularly in the area of complex forms.

I now have available:

Professional and Self Referral Forms (£130 for both)
Volunteer online diary (£80)
Volunteer Application Form (£80)

The first professional referral form took 1 week to create from scratch. I start with an off the shelf copy of one of the forms, and take feedback to modify the form for your organisation.

The form has two major components; what you can see online, and a formatted email which is returned to the organisation with all of the data in it. It is also possible to include the data as a CSV string of characters which you could import into a spreadsheet or database. The email is human readable and annotated to clearly list the data submitted by the user.

You can see some examples on this site and have a play: https://wingrove-media.uk

Contact me for more details. I can also point you to live examples which are currently in use by various organisations.

Client Data on Websites

GDPR and your website

When you created your GDPR conformance policy, you should have given consideration to where data is located in your organisation. If you do not know where it is located, you cannot really claim to control it.

The websites I have created over the last 5 years do not contain a lot of user data by design. The data in the site, other than what is visible to the public is generally limited to the administrators and editors on the site, things such as email addresses and where subscriber lists are present there may be subscriber names and email addresses held in the site. But not much else.

This means if a hacker gets into a site, there is not really very much there which might be of value to them.

I am aware of some sites though that contain copies of forms being submitted through the site. This can occur if someone else has added a form manager that does this, or a database extension to collect and store user submitted information.

There is no value in keeping copies within the website if the email function is working and all user submitted data is sent to your organisation for processing. In fact retaining copies of previously submitted forms will likely contain sensitive information which could represent a data breach if the data fell into the wrong hands.

Check your website

It is worth checking your website to make sure there are no records of previous form data being retained in the website. If you find something and you know this data has been submitted to the organisation through an email account, you do not need copies on your website. So delete them all. It is worth considering whether it is possible to stop copies being retained, or if you cannot stop copies being retained, make a note to revisit your site and delete them regularly. A form manager that does not retain copies might ultimately be a better choice for the future.

← Plugin is crashing sites (11th July 2022) Beware of Phishing →

Home-Start Volunteer Diary Form

Over the years I have been asked several times if I can build a Home-Start Volunteer Diary form online. To do a one off is prohibitively expensive, and I have not bothered to look at it in any detail in the past.

I have had a recent request, and based on my experience using Contact Form 7 and the layout manager plugin I have built a demonstrator. You can try this form out for yourself. It will send a message back to your email address with up to 122 different items of data formatted in an email.

You can locate the page here: https://wingrove-media.uk/vol-diary/

If this is of interest to your organisation (most likely a Home-Start) then please send me an email letting me know, and I will keep you in the loop as it develops.

There is already 6.5hrs work in this form and over 870 lines of code. It is outside of mainstream website development and maintenance, but if there is significant interest, I can share the development cost across multiple organisations which would make it more attractive as a development project.

← Home-Start Resources Page Plugin is crashing sites (11th July 2022) →

Complex Referral Forms

I have had several requests for complicated online forms from people over the years. The problem is if you try to copy all of a typical referral form and build an online one it just looks as intimidating as the paper copy.

I have been working with Home-Start North Somerset over the past 8 weeks to develop an online referral form. This is now live, it does not cater for all of the fields in a referral form, but it does capture a lot of it, which will help in handling the referral.

The forms (Professional and self referral) generate an email and package the data up in an easy to use format. If you think you might benefit from something like this, or need a custom form, please get in touch.

You can see the launch page here: Referrals Page on Home-Start North Somerset.

There are two buttons on the page which will guide the user to one of two forms.

As described last month, or was it the month before?? I have a page here which demo a version of a complex online form, you can try it out for yourself and see what it generates by going to here: https://wingrove-media.uk/generic-application-or-referral-form/ At the bottom of the form you can send the email to yourself.

← Spring Clean? Case Study - Extreme Spam! →

From website referral form to CRM

Mainly for Home-Start organisations, but it can apply to any group with online referral or application forms.

I have built a proof of concept which has a referral form online which is quite complicated.

The user inputs data into the form and then sends it to the recipient.

The recipient has a very easy form to read. The form formatting can be applied to user requirements.

Within the form the data is duplicated as a CSV string of characters (Character Separated Value). You can copy this block of text and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet and then apply Text to Columns command. Now each cell has a data field contents in it. You can manipulate it further from here, or even import it into your CRM system.

To find out more and look at a working example with documentation that you can try online, go to here: http://wingrove-media.uk/generic-application-or-referral-form/

Follow the link above to visit the page with the form on and try it out for yourself.

← For Home-Starts and a couple of questions Evening Tutorials →

Anti Spam Measure for Forms

I have used a variety of Form Managers on sites over the years. The majority of you should have Contact Form 7 on your site. I have used a standard feature in Contact Form 7 which is a hidden field. Computers can see it, but humans cannot see it, so they do not fill it in. If the form is submitted and the hidden field has data in it, it is not accepted becasue it has been added by a computer so the form is rejected.

It certainly helps in most cases, but I am also aware that some of you seem to have websites targetted from time to time. Here is another simple addition to your forms which may help. It is a simple quiz which will prevent submission unless the answer is correct.

There are standard forms of recaptcha used by Google. It relies on a human interpreting what is in a picture, or pictures. It can be particularly tiresome on some websites. I have also noted a difference in operation of Google Recaptcha with different types of browser. It works very well with Chrome, less so with other browsers.

The following is a simple addition to your Contact Form 7. Download the file by clicking at the bottom of this post and copy the text and insert it just above the entry for the Enter button.

Here is an example:

I have inserted another form control between the message area of the form and the Enter button. Here is what it looks like in the Contact Form 7 Layout. Highlighted in yellow below.

It may look complicated, but it isn’t really. There is a short explanation at the start and a series of questions, each with the response expected like this:

“1 plus 2 =|3”

You can build your own questions for example:

“What is the capital of France?|Paris”

Anyone submitting a message can see the question, but not the answer.

Of course none of this should be really necessary. But unfortunately there is a large group of people that must see some success from sending spam messages otherwise it would not be worth effort.

Will this solve the problem?

I honestly do not know. I am pretty sure with some of the anti spam measures which are often defeated, there must be people who are paid to paste messages into forms. In which case none of these methods will work. But if you are currently plagued with spam messages coming in via the website, this may be worth a try.

Do It Yourself

Locate your contact form by logging in and locating Contact in the side bar. Look for the form(s) and open one. Towards the bottom of the form you will see the text:

[submit “Send”]

Place some line breaks between this and the content above it. Then click on the download button to download the example code. Then paste it into the space you have made. Save the form and then go to your contact us page and test it. Make sure it works and you still receive a message through your website before leaving.

Any problems drop me a line or call me. Click on the button below, you should see the text, copy it, and paste it into the form as described.

Download Code Here (text file) opens in a new window

Processing Form Data

I was asked if it was possible to add a form to a website for an event dinner, collect the responses and place them into a website to reduce the laborious activity of copying feedback in forms by hand. Other examples of where you might want to do this are with a census, or survey. In the past I have helped to set these up and created the associated form, the responses come back as emails. These then need to be processed by hand.

Having given this some thought, there is another way you could do this to simplify the data collection and processing. The problem is getting the responses into a spreadsheet. Once it is in a spreadsheet, then it is relatively easy to write formulae to process it, or extract the data you need.

There are several aspects to this, some may not be that obvious:

1). The form data can present the options, and the form can only respond with a single selected option. So for example we can say you have a menu choice: Rolled Pork, Rolled Brisquet, Vegetable Stack. You can only select one of them. What is selected and returned in the form is the precise choice of words. If it is precise, then it is unique. You can process it in a spreadsheet.

2). While you can have forms that say Enter A,B,C,D, E, F where A is strongly agree, and F is Strongly disagree. What you get back is A, B, C, D, E, or F. But this is not easy to process. Whereas “Strongly Agree” is easy to process. So use the language that humans understand. You can abbreviate it later in a spreadsheet. This is of much greater importance if you are not a computer programmer, or software engineer. Those people can think in terms of variable names, and values. If you are not used to thinking that way, keep it simple.

3). If the website uses Contact Form 7 (one of the most popular contact form plugins and one I have been using for several years now), you can build the response email up very precisely. So much so that you can create the top part of the email in a human readable format, and the bottom part in a computer readable format which you can use in a spreadsheet.

4). Send a copy of the response back to the person that sent it to you. It is good manners really, and in the case of a Dinner Dance, you have a hard copy of what you ordered for dinner.

Processing the Data

You will see examples later in this article, let’s assume that I am collecting feedback on dinner choices. I have created a form which I can collect information from people. In this case I have received the following:

Starter: Smoked Salmon with Celeriac and Prawn Salad

Main Course: Slow-cooked Rolled Brisquet with gravy

Dessert: Summer Pudding

I can format the responses in the email which comes back to the organisation like this for human consumption, and like this for adding to a spreadsheet:

Smoked Salmon with Celeriac and Prawn Salad,Slow-cooked Rolled Brisquet with gravy,Summer Pudding

You will hopefully agree that the first version is easy to interpret, but the second version on a single line you have to look more carefully at to interpret. So we provide both.

CSV

The second version is the data presented in a CSV format or Comma Separated Value format. If you look closely the three values are separated by commas.

I can paste that second CSV formatted row into a spreadsheet row for later formatting.

Wait while collecting form data

If I use a special email box for all of those responses, I can set up the form and forget about it until I need to do some processing. All of the data will go to a special email account. I just work my way down, open up each one and paste the CSV formatted line to a new row in the spreadsheet.

Convert the CSV rows to columns

Next I choose Data in the spreadsheet, highlight the rows of responses and convert the rows of CSV data to columns. After this is done, all of my First Course, Main Course and Desserts are all in aligned columns.

Plus I know that the content in the columns is predictable and finite, I am not going to find Jelly under Dessert because it was not an option to start with.

Add in some formulae

Choose a location at n+1 rows down your sheet where n is the maximum number of responses you were expecting.

If I choose a range for say the Dessert column on the spreadsheet and I carefully look at the available options I will find that there can only be four possibilities. In this case none, Summer Pudding, Chocolate Tart or Lemon Cheesecake. I can now set up a formula which will count the total number of instances of “none”, “Summer Pudding”, “Chocolate Tart”, “Lemon Cheesecake”. In other words I have created an automatic way of counting the instances of a given response in a single column.

Summary

If you have something moderately complex you wish to achieve, it is possible to build CSV based response and paste these into a spreadsheet, convert them to data in columns, and then process the columns. It can make the tedious steps of processing information a lot easier.

I am looking at this right now as an example for someone, so I will come back and provide a downloadable guide here once I have progressed it further. (January 2020).

Update Feb 12th 2020: This system has been implemented and is in use with a client. It is now very very easy to collate all of the responses and run some analysis on a spreadsheet to identify, total income, total number of attendees, total plates of each type for the kitchen, and also identify special dietary needs. If the user had to paste each value from every email it would have taken a considerable longer period of time.

Contact me to discuss further if you want to do something like this.

Online Referral Form

From time to time I am asked about whether it is possible to add an online referral form. While anything is possible they can get very complicated and if you wish to add conditional elements into the form as well, the complexity rises further. If one also considers making some fields mandatory, then the complexity rises further and you run the risk that the form cannot be submitted because some element is missing.

Just for the record

I have looked at a number of solutions, but so far have not found one that universally works for all. But if there is significant interest I can look again.

Form Using Standard Form Plugin

I currently favour Contact Form 7 as a contact form plugin. It is one of the most popular ones out there. I also use several add on plugins as well. I know there are some additional plugins which can be used to control the formatting and make conditional entries into the form. But for a newbie (i.e. you), it is going to be a bit difficult to get your head around all of the things the form can do.

But it is possible, however the form would likely be submitted in several parts for very complicated forms.

Adobe Form Solution

I am aware that if you subscribe to one of the Adobe products relating to PDF management that it is possible to embed a PDF form in your website which a user can fill in online. However this solution is very expensive (for charities), so I have not looked at this in any further detail.

Google Forms

Here there are several choices, but from my earlier experience there were limitations which might affect your users. Google offers a suite of programs available to people with gmail accounts. If you are a chrome book user (very simple low cost computer), you will know that while you cannot run MicroSoft Applications on your chrome book, you can run equivalent applications which are compatible with the popular Office Apps. All of this is free. But you need to be using Chrome as a browser. Not all computers will have Chrome installed. So this may block this path.

G-Suite

There is a business version as well of G Suite, which is not particularly expensive. There is the basic version of G Suite at 6$ per month, Business at $12 and Enterprise at $25. It includes secure communications, office type apps run online, calendering and various other things. Find out more here: https://gsuite.google.com/

The detail about Google Forms can be found here: https://gsuite.google.com/products/forms/

What I am not sure about is from a privacy standpoint where is the data collected and stored (you need to know this from a GDPR perspective,) whether it is encrypted, and whether copies are held somewhere. But most fundamentally, will it work in FireFox, Safari, Edge, MS Explorer etc, in other words anything apart from Chrome. If it does not, then it is a non starter.

Add a special Form Manager

There are websites that can be built exclusively for collecting data. I know there are some free ones available within the hosting, I have played with one in the past called Lime Survey, but if you are not editing things on a daily basis, then the learning curve might be a bit steep, if you need to edit something.

Use an iFrame

Some of you are now using a 3rd party system in the office to replace MESH (Home-Start users). Some of you will have your own systems. When you view a video on your website, you are looking at an iFrame or a window, through which you can see another website. In the video case it is YouTube. It is potentially possible to show the form you use to enter data into a system from a form submitted to you, but display the form directly to the user through the website. It largely depends on your form, and whether there is a way of displaying it and limiting what the end user can see of the rest of the system.

But this might be worth exploring if you are interested.

Where to from here?

The fundamentall problem is research in this area, and subsequent development is very time consuming, I am sure there are solutions out there, but so far I have not found one that fits all of the requirements. If you are interested in solving this problem let me know. If I can find enough interested parties I may look into it more detail later this year. Let mew know if you are interested.

One last point which is also potentially possible

Part of the problem for the back office is processing the incoming form data copying it across from one system to another. There are generally scripts that can be created for the receiving system which will populate a form from a document that is submitted to it. Contact Form 7 allows very precise formatting of the incoming data. It is conceivable that someone could write a script that takes the incoming form via email, identifies the fields and copies the data across automatically at the touch of a button. I cannot do all of this, but if there was an agreed standard for the submission from your website to your organisation, then someone associated with your organisation could write the backoffice processing script which would overcome the manual re-entry and save a lot of time.

Adding in a table

Sometimes you need to add a table into a webpage. There are several ways of doing this. You can create a table in MS Word and copy it, then paste it into a page. You can do the same with Excel. However neither of these is particularly elegant. In both cases you can end up with a largely responsive table provided you do not have too many elements in there.

There is a plugin for that..

One particularly neat solution which has a huge number of users, and very high approval ratings is TablePress. This is a downloadable plugin.

Go to the Plugins option in your wordpress site, and add a new plugin and enter Tablepress into the search box and it will find it. Add it to your website and activate it.

Post activation you will find it as an option in the dashboard menu. TO add a table simply go into the plugin settings and choose Add Table, define how many columns and rows it needs and then build your content in WordPress.

There are also options on importing tables from other sources. It is a very flexible plugin that is not too difficult to use.

Need help, or interested in using it? Drop me a line.

Password Protected Pages in Divi

On many Home-Start sites, and some of the regional charity websites I have included one or more password based pages. You can add these yourself, it is controlled in the editing view of the page or post on the right handside where it refers to Visibility. You have the following available:

Public
Public (and stick to the front page)
Password Protected
Private

Items are normally set up as Public. If you use Public and stick to the front page, check what it does first. It may not work as you expect it to work because it relates to the template.

Password protected pages in Divi

There is an annoying problem with password protected pages in Divi, if you try to enter one the first time you will see small writing on the left and a button on the right. On a wide screen these look totally disconnected, and not obvious. If you have a non Divi based website, you are unaffected.