Web Forms for Marketers 2: Customisation

The latest version of Sitecore CMS includes a new forms module, Web Forms for Marketers 2. As part of the marketing team here at ClearPeople, I can attest first hand to the benefits of forms on our own website and the improved capabilities of this new release. Particularly beneficial for me are the reports I am able to run such as; dropouts, usability and conversion tracking. Although I can review the data in Sitecore, I always find it’s easier to download the report to excel so I can play around with it a little bit, save and send it to colleagues.

Interestingly, I was able to sit down today with our resident web forms expert here at ClearPeople and have him explain to me some of the customisations we have done for clients on this new forms module. If I do say so myself, we have done some pretty cool things to extend the out of the box capabilities of web forms, to meet client specific requirements.

The customisations we do can be fit into two categories “actions” and “fields”. A typical default action is to save the user information into a database and send an email to notify the host organisation that a form has been completed. Sitecore CMS has many out-of-box actions, which can be seen in the image below.

However, one of our clients requested that we develop a way for an email to be sent directly to the visitor that completed the form to either confirm or thank them for the submission. This custom action engages the visitor. This is done by pulling the information from the completed form and inserting it into an email template that corresponds with the action.

The field customisations have provided clients an way to improve data collection and web analytics. The custom fields we have built include:

• IP Text Box—when a web visitor fills out and submits a form, this hidden box reports the IP address that the user used to the host organisation. This assists security and helps to understand the user profile
  
• Pre-populated text box- our Sitecore expert explained this to me as a “dynamically generated default value.” When my face went blank, he gave me a very good example that seemed so much easier to understand! The example was of someone visiting a product page on a website, if they wanted to enquire about a product, they would click on a button that would bring up an email template; the template would already have the product ID inserted.
  
• Check box—Web Forms allows content managers to set certain fields as required, however it doesn’t allow this for check boxes. With customisation, a check box can be a required field, of particular use when it comes to posting a disclaimer or user agreement.
  
• URL Text Box—Like the IP Text Box, this is a hidden field that picks up where the visitor came to the form from and sends it to reporting.

Hope these little titbits helped you see the capabilities of Web Forms for your own website! Until next time...