Umbraco Forms and YouUmbraco forms are a powerful tool installed to most Umbraco based sites that can allow you to create forms for your websites with ease. But did you know that there are some cool tricks you can do with it as well?Luckily for you, we have compiled a list of our top 3 tips and tricks for Umbraco forms and how you can create an innovative submission process for your users!On a side note, these tips will use Umbraco Forms: Version 3+ but many of these tips are backward-compatible with older versions. Tip number 1 - Sending to Multiple AddressesWith forms there can be times where you may think "I wish I could get my contact form to send to my email address and to my colleague's email address" but you may not be sure how to do this.In Umbraco forms, each form has its own set of rules, known as workflows. These workflows tell the form how to operate before, during and after the user has submitted it. Naturally, these are setup with the default workflow of "Send Email" to occur after a user has submitted a form, but you can add as many workflow elements as you wish. As such, you can add an additional 'Send Email' workflow to a second address.To access this, click 'configure workflow' located at the bottom of your form. For older versions of Umbraco forms this can be found as a child node under the form.From here, select the option 'Send Email' and fill in the details. Save your form and now your form will send to two email addresses as opposed to one. Tip number 2 - ValidationWe can often see issues arising with email/phone numbers on forms where users have submitted incorrect details for these fields. Phone numbers with text in or email addresses that are missing say the '.co.uk' or '.com.' Whereas Umbraco forms come with a built-in validation tool on the text string input boxes.To access this, click the cog wheel next to the text string input box. Scroll down the options and you will eventually see a box with 'Validation' written within it. Click this and you will see the various options for validating. Select the option you wish and save your form, 'Validation' is now active on that form field. Tip number 3 - Multi-page FormsDo you have a long form? In many cases this can be daunting to a lot of users and may even deter them from filling one out.Umbraco forms were built with this in mind and we can actually split the form up into separate pages so the user isn't faced with 50+ questions on the same page. This can even help you to categorise your questions all together! Simply at the bottom of the form, you will see an 'Add New Page' button. By clicking this, you will add a new page to your Umbraco form which can then be extended just like the original page.Now always remember to save your forms after each change otherwise the changes could be lost!We hope these 3 tips will help you create interesting and innovative Umbraco forms for your customers. Made an interesting form and want to share your form-making prowess? Take a screenshot and tweet @V8MediaUK including the hashtag #FormsFTW!
