Form Builder

Placeholders

Placeholders are a key ingredient to making a versatile, re-usable Template Set. They let you define optional settings that show up in the Form Builder window, which can be entered for each form that uses the Template Set. Placeholders give you almost unlimited flexibility in the content, behaviour and appearance of your forms.

Maybe a few examples would help. Using placeholders, you could define settings for your Template Set to allow the administrator to control any or all of the following:

• Fonts, font-sizes, font colours
• Choice of banners / logos
• Whether or not a reCAPTCHA should appear in the form, and where it would be located
• Whether ads get displayed in the page or not, their locations and which should appear
• The overall colours of the form - highlight colours, error colours etc.
• Showing specific text or images on particular form pages
• Show different information on each page, depending on what the user entered in previous form pages

That's just off the top of my head. The whole idea of Placeholders was that they wouldn't box you in at all: if you need something custom, a placeholder will let you do it.

How they work

The simplest way to see how they work is to simply edit an existing Template Set and click around. But here's a more descriptive explanation, for people who prefer that!

Placeholders can be stored in most of the standard field types: radios, checkboxes, input fields, dropdowns and textareas. Each placeholder is given a specific variable name which can be used in your templates and resources. The placeholder looks something like this: {{$P.your_placeholder}}.

That placeholder, when used, will contain whatever value is entered or selected by the administrator within the Form Builder window. For example:

{{* this just outputs the content of the placeholder *}} {{$P.your_placeholder}} {{* this tests the value of the placeholder and outputs a message if it's equal to 1 *}} {{if $P.your_placeholder == "1"}} It equals 1! {{/if}}

The second example - the conditional test - is exceedingly useful. You can use that technique to output different styles into a CSS resource, or show specific content in your templates. It all depends on what you want to do!