Joomla Feedback Forms Options
Last Updated on Tuesday, 02 June 2009 23:29 Written by Georg Tuesday, 02 June 2009 21:49
Quite some of our customers were asking us to develop customized complex feedback forms in Joomla, detailed down to the tiniest design pixel positioning. See this example, for instance, on ellco.no - where we used Joomla Artforms' practically infinite customizing capabilities to deliver specially crafted forms.
But another customer of ours [Autocom], after enjoying Artforms on their Joomla! notebook parts service website for more than one year time, arrived to the following situation: collecting every mail feedback generated by Artforms inside a Gmail account, making the service response available to more than one of Autocom's employees, regardless if sitting in the office or out on the field. Now, if you don't live under a rock, you will know that Gmail structures emails in conversations, coeing same-sender mails into one single such conversation. Simply put, Gmail was stacking successive feedback requests, from random site visitors looking for different laptop parts to replace, into one conversation alone, one quite large, and growing, conversation.
We were asked to make the feedback form in Joomla send mails not "From" the site's default mail [the way Artforms does, like many others focused on design], but having the "From" header field collect the value as each of the submitters' email address in part. And one other lil thing: we had to do this overnight, not wasting time with days of analyzing code and refactoring Artforms source files. In haste, as most customers use to ask us, and in all honesty according to their own business particular chores. After some tweaks in the Artforms files, we opted for replacing Artforms with QContacts, a development of Joomla's core contact form. It meets client's requests, including adding up to six extra customizable fields. Coincidentally, the fields were falling even with the initial number in Artforms. And we may add more on the way.
In conclusion: When we're given time, then we may hack into code in order to change the behavior of a Joomla component. When no time, then we're most likely gonna replace that component with a more basic one, delivering the newly requested functionality. Sometime function prevails over design. Yet design may follow, if time allows, as always.
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