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Getting Started

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Getting Started

If you're new to Form Tools, this is where you should start! It contains a general introduction to the script so you have an idea of what it does and how it works.

About Form Tools

Form Tools is a forms framework written in PHP and MySQL. You download and install the script on your own website. At its heart, Form Tools is a web form creator, processor, data storage and access script. It was originally designed to work with any existing web form, but has since been expanded to create forms automatically as well.

Form Tools is extremely versatile in how it integrates with your forms. You can use the bundled Form Builder module to create the forms automatically on your website (no programming or HTML skills necessary); you can use the PHP API to integrate your own custom form with the script; or you can simply POST your form to Form Tools, and just use it to store the form data. Anything goes! You can read about the different integration methods / form creation methods here.

Form Tools works by creating custom database tables to store your unique form data. It provides a range of functionality customized to your data set, such as allowing you to view, update, cross-reference and export your submission data, create subsets of your data for viewing/editing by "client" accounts, data visualizations, and much more.

To our knowledge, there's no other script out there that was designed in the same way - or any that provide anywhere near the degree of control over your data that Form Tools affords you.

Feature Highlights

Here are some of the script's key features:

Free!
Yup! Form Tools is available under the GNU Public License, free for anyone to download and modify.
Re-usable
A single installation can handle as many forms as you wish - even from different websites. You can set up as many client accounts as you wish, enabling multiple users to log in, view and manage their own data online. Form Tools 2 provides a wide palette of permission settings to allow you to precisely customize who sees what.
Generic
Very little modification to the web forms is needed to allow Form Tools to store their content. It works with virtually any web form!
Brandable
By simply designing a default image and changing a few default values in the Setup Options, you may customize Form Tools as belonging to your own company. The entire script is theme-based, using Smarty templates to generate the HTML. If need be, you can customize the UI for each of your clients so that it looks completely different for each user.
Extensible
Form Tools 2 is fully modular, and some additional documentation has been written to help you extend the script in whatever way you need. In addition, one of our main goals was to allow strong integration between our script and the outside world. For example, it was designed to be used in conjunction with other software, such as online credit card payment processing; the script is also designed to allow data export in a variety of (customizable) formats, such as XML. And, of course, since the code is downloadable for free under the GNU Public License, you can always access and edit the code yourself!
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