• InFormal

Informal is an easy to use web form management software. It allows non-technical folks to create forms with a few mouse clicks and start collecting data on the Internet. Informal is web browser based.

Status

• Due to my travels I currently don't have time to continue the development on Informal

News

• November 3rd 2005: The Commission on Sustainable Development Youth Caucus collects contact data with Informal
• November 2nd 2005: This wiki page is created
• October 2005: EYFA art caravan participant registration online

• June 2005: EYFA collects surveys for their Ecorates currency with Informal - fill out the questionaire

• May 2005: EYFA uses Informal for the Ecotopia 2005 summer camp participant registration
• January 2005: A development version of Informal is used by EYFA for their winter meeting participant registration and I received sponsorship for the development

Screenshots

Everybody loves screenshots! Here are some snaps from the development version, just so you get an idea:

• Form editor (v0.7pre)

• Form editor editing a text field (v0.7pre)

• A form created with Informal (v0.6)

• Submissions list (v0.6)

Detailed features list

Public form

• Display form elements and static content blocks
• Required form elements are marked
• Validation of user input, error messages at missing or wrong input
• Thank-you message and link after successful submission
• Storage of submitted data in database and nofification by email to form administrator
• Optional confirmation email to user, if email address is given

Informal admin

• Create/remove users
• Set limits for number of forms per users
• Activity log

Form manager

• Overview
  • List of forms
  • Create, modify, publish/unpublish and remove forms
  • Select form to modify
• Submissions
  • List of all submissions of a form with number, time and date and all form fields and their values
  • Re-sort list by clicking on table headers
  • Editing, modifying, commenting, deleting of submissions
• Form editor
  • Add form elements
    • Text fields (1 line and several lines)
    • Checkboxes
    • Radio button sets
    • Select drop-downs
    • Static elements (headlines, texts, horizontal divider)
    • Predefined lists, e.g. for all countries in Europe or the world
  • Preview of form with edit, move and delete function
  • Set form elements mandatory
  • Define validation rules, check user input for
    • Valid email address
    • Numbers or letters only
  • Hidden elements (only visible to the form administrators, e.g. for internal comments)
  • Define label for submit button
• Form properties
  • Set form name
  • Set up notification email to form administrator at new submission
  • Activate confirmation email to the person filling out the form
  • Customise thank you message
  • Choose a form design (themes)
  • Set form start and closing date (e.g. for event related forms)
• Mail templates
  • Modify the email sent to form administrator and form user
  • Add placeholders that will be filled with values entered into the form

System requirements

• Apache 1.3 or newer
• PHP 4.3.0 or newer
• MySQL 4.0 or newer
• A web browser :o)

Appendix

A sample case study

You are organising a meeting and need some information about your participants beforehand. So you decide to ask people to register online. People that want to make a presentation need to fill an extra form. Things will happen in this order:

1. Your favourite techie will download Informal and install it on your server. You can also ask me to host your form on informal.benn.org.
2. Your techie (Informal admin) creates a user for you, e.g. "Organiser"
3. You log in to the Informal Form manager and create two forms: "Participant Registration" and "Workshop Registration"
4. Open the Form Editor for "Participant Registration" and do the following:
   • add a field for first and last name, make them mandatory
   • add a field for email address, apply the "check for valid email address" rule
   • add a pre-defined list with the countries of Europe
   • create checkboxes for every day of your event
   • add a description for the checkboxes "Which days do you plan to attend?"
   • add a short text at the top to explain what the event is about
   • label the submit button "Register me"
5. Open the Form Editor for "Workshop Registration" and:
   • add a field for the facilitator's name, make it mandatory
   • add a field for the workshop title, mandatory
   • add a textbox with several lines for the workshop description, mandatory
   • add checkboxes for required things: projector, laptop, video, translator
   • label the submit button "Register workshop"
6. Today is November 2nd, your event will take place on Nov 30th, so you go to Form Properties and set the start date for your form to Nov 5th and the end date to Nov 28th, well let's make it Nov 29th
7. Also activate email notifications and confirmation email in the Form Properties
8. Give the emails a personal touch in the Mail Templates. Add lines like "Hello {First name}" and "We are looking forward to your workshop about {Workshop topic}".
9. The days go by and on Nov 10th you get your first registration. You click on the link in the email, log in and look at the details of the submission.
10. Until Nov 20th many submissions have been made, you log in and go to "Submissions". Some people had their fun making hoax submissions, others pressed the submit button twice. You delete those submissions. Some people made spelling mistakes, you fix them in the submission editor.
11. You want to see where people will be coming from, so you re-sort the submission list by clicking on the table header. Wow, 5 people from Romania!
12. The event begins, Informal stopped taking registrations a day ago, people run around with printed submission lists, setting up equipment for the workshops.

13. A few months after the event your techie asks you if you still need those forms. Hum, not sure. You log in, export all submissions and save them to your disk and delete the forms. See you next year.

Design goals

• Easy to use and understand. Meaning, even my mum needs to understand why Informal is cool and how to create a simple form. No computer lingo in the interface please. And have "advanced options" separated.

• Extendable code. Well, I'm not a scientist, I'm a hacker. So that's up to you fellow coders. I tried my best so far.

• Accessible. XHTML, CSS, WAI validation, RSS and all that jazz.
• Light-weight. No graphics in the default theme.

Ideas for extension

"Readymades"

Idea: Download forms created by other people and import them into your Informal. Save your own forms and upload them to the sample forms database.

Difficulty: Low. The forms are saved as XML in the database. Only these XML packages need to be exchanged.

File uploads

Idea: Allow people to upload an image or their CV to a form.

Difficulty: Medium. The undelying PEAR Quickform library handles file uploads, but the database needs to be extended for storing files.

Export filters

Idea: Let form administrators export their submissions to a comma separated list or an open spreadsheet format.

Difficulty: High. Quite some code needs to be written and a new Form Manager section Export (and Import?) needs to be created.

A theme garden

Idea: Offer different themes for download.

Difficulty: Low. Informal has theme support built-in. The templates are in Smarty.