Looking to get some collective help here as i'm trying to figure out how best to build a form that will fire off an email when a user clicks submits.
Building the form is a piece of cake thanks to BS studio but getting the php element working is proving to be my biggest challenge. So was wondering if anyone can share some thoughts or guidance on how best to do that here.
i appreciate that PHP is not going to work in editor and that i will have to export and upload a php doc to server direct, but keen to hear other people experiences and how you overcome this on BSS.
Creating the backend for forms is a challenge if you are not familiar with server-side languages like PHP, Python, Ruby etc. Maybe we can offer some kind of automatic form handling in the next releases. For example you can just drag and drop a form together, check a checkbox and decide on which email to receive the form submission. Our server will handle the actual form processing and email sending.
Machform is another nice tool if you have PHP enabled on your server. Most people seem to, but not all. If you do I can tell you it's worth every penny to invest in it as it's a very versatile form builder.
Although useful, I can't see why most of the mass mailing stuff can't be done on your own rather than a component for it. If you add that one then you have dozens of others including Mailchimp and ConstantContact etc that would also be needed for everyone else that uses all the others. They all give you the code to add to your sites so it's pretty simple to add it to a Custom Code box rather than creating separate components for it. That's usually all that is needed too is just a box of code, no files are usually needed to add (js, css, etc) so it's just a block of code and a simple thing to add yourself. Just my opinion here, and this is also not what the original poster is asking about. They are talking about single form type email sends, not mass mailing setups.
Having said that, you can easily create a setup for your mass mailer and then save it as a component for yourself or to share with others and then reuse it as you need it. :)
Using "Bootstrap Studio server" to handle the actual form processing and email sending is a security issue for some websites. For example I would allow my contact form information to send through a trusted mail server(company email) and not any server.
I believe that this goes totally out of the Bootstrap Studio proposal and the team may lose focus and the application may lose quality. My point of view.
Given that you already have the Form component, and the "Action" parameter to set the script name such as "sendContact.php" in addition to other optional parameters ...
I also have no PHP experience, but that does not stop me from doing a search and finding scripts ready and adapting them. Nothing personal, I just think there's a risk Bootstrap Studio will lose focus and in the future will be just another "editor" of pages and not that wonder it is today!
As you mentioned yourself in other posts @Martin, BSS is a front-end tool and should continue to be like that. It would be alright to have the form design as a component, but the functions should be made by the user in my opinion. I know I'm not posting much, keep up the great work BSS team!
If you do add the email handling component, and you need to if you are going to produce a useful interface for the less knowledgeable users, you might consider building the facility for users to add their own mail server account details from their ISP rather only using your own server. Better for you and better for the user I think.