In this concise tutorial, Ryan Dohrn walks viewers through the essential tasks for managing forms with the RSForm Pro component in Joomla. He begins by showing how to access RSForm Pro via the Components menu, then demonstrates managing existing forms, adding new fields (using a Text Box as an example), and editing field properties such as name, caption, required flag, size, and validation messages. The video covers layout and theming choices (inline, two‑line, column formats), configuring the form’s title, return URL, thank‑you message, and setting up both user‑side and admin‑side email notifications, including the use of the “Toggle Quick Add” feature to insert field attributes into email bodies. Ryan also shows how to preview a form, duplicate an existing form to avoid rebuilding from scratch, and rename the duplicated copy. The tutorial concludes with Ryan’s contact information (brainswellmedia.com and ryan@brainswellmedia.com) and an encouragement to reach out with questions.
Chapters
Alright, today we're going to talk about how to manage and/or create forms with RSForm Pro, and that's a paid component, but I get a lot of questions about this nonetheless. You're going to log in and go to Components and then RSForm Pro, and from here you can manage forms, manage the submissions of the forms, change your configurations, backup, restore, updates, and there's certain plugins as well. Let's go to Manage Forms. Now, once we're here, what we'll notice is here are the 3 forms that are created, okay? Now, RSForm Pro is gonna come with a multi-page example and a regular example as well. But let's first talk about how you would actually go about just managing a form that's already there. So, here's the Quick Connect form here for one of my websites. And what you're gonna do when you log in is you'll notice there's several tabs along the top. This tab, Components, is so you can actually go in and manage and edit what you're seeing within your form. So, for example, if I wanted to add a text box to this form, I would simply just click on Text Box, and then I would give it a name. Usually I like to keep the name singular, so I might just say FName, you know, for first name. Okay, the caption is what's going to be displayed, so then I might type First Name, and then you can see it's pretty intuitive. Is it required, yes or no? Let's say yes. What size do you want it to be, and if someone does it wrong, what do you want the the validation or error message to be, and then you simply click Save, and then that will add it to the form. If you've got a form and you already have some text here and you want to edit it, under the Components tab, you'll see this little Edit icon. Just simply click on Edit, and then it's actually going to open here on the left. Make your changes and then click Update. It's as easy as that. In a lot of these, you'll notice there's a ton of options here that you're going to have to just play around with a little bit. Here's the layout of the form. How do you want it to appear? Inline, 2 lines, 2 lines and columns. You can play with that a little bit. It gives you some theming options. You can go in and edit, you know, the actual form itself. You know, the name of the form, the title of the form, where do you want the form to return to, okay, after somebody submits the form, the thank you message. Here's the emails that will be generated and sent to the actual user. Itself after the form is submitted, and then here's the admin emails. What do you want the admin emails to say to go to the admin? Now, if you just want to use the properties from the form, see this little button here, Toggle Quick Add? You can turn that on, see, and then you can actually bring— copy these. So, if you want to do the full name, caption, and the value, you can just copy and paste these. You just go over here and edit the email text, okay? And then you can just go like I've done here and just paste the attributes you see here into the body itself, okay? And so you can see that RSForm Pro is just really a dynamic— you can add scripts to your forms, metadata, etc., etc. And then up here you can preview the form as well. I mean, there's a lot to cover in RSForm Pro in terms of just a couple-minute tutorial, but I think that we've covered a couple of the most common things: how to edit the text within a form and how to add things to a form. Now back here in the Manage Forms, a lot of times what I like to do is simply go to a form I've created before, like one of these examples will work well. Just simply click on it and then go to the top here and click Duplicate, and that allows you not to have to start from scratch, you know, every single time. Now just remember something, when you duplicate it, it's going to have the same name with a copy, so you're going to want to click on it and then you're going to want to go into the actual edit form and change the title, okay, so how it appears on the page. Okay, so I'm Ryan Dohrn, internet consultant from Brain Swell Media, and appreciate you watching these tutorials and hope that you find them to be, you know, very helpful. If you have any questions, let us know. You can always reach us over at our main website, brainswellmedia.com. You can always pop me a note as well, it's just ryan@brainswellmedia.com. Alright, good luck with Joomla. Hope this tutorial was helpful. Take care.
