Form Tools Demo
Create me a demo!
Welcome to our online demo! Use the form below to create your own unique, pre-configured installation of Form Tools. You are welcome to do anything you like with it: delete forms, clients, fields, add data, uninstall modules and more. Knock yourself out!
Demos last for 24 hours only. They are automatically deleted when their time expires.
About the Form Tools Demo
What's the best way to introduce people to a piece of software so they can
understand it as quickly as possible?
It's tough! Form Tools is a big, advanced script with a lot of components. Some features you'll use all the time, others you won't - and everyone needs something slightly different. And even though Form Tools has some great help documentation available, let's face it: it's usually simpler to just show how something works rather than explain it.
Our Solution
When you request a new Form Tools demo, you get an unique, custom installation of Form Tools, generated for you alone. The demo includes a fake registration site so you can get a sense of how Form Tools may be integrated into your website. We've preconfigured the demo to highlight a few things that are most likely to be of use to you. We've added some forms, created some clients, added some visualizations, reports and more.
All demos expire after 24 hours, when they get deleted from the server.
Limitations
Unfortunately, in order to prevent evildoers from abusing it, we had to disable the following features:
- File uploads
- Email notifications
Demo Features
The following pages highlight some of the more central aspects of the demo:
- The Forms - this page describes each form in the demo, and how they differ.
- Client Accounts - this describes each client account, and what they have access to.
- Modules - a little info about Form Tools modules.
- Charts and Graphs - about the Data Visualization module.
- Reports - about the Reports module.
- Pages module - about the Pages module.
Demo Features » The Forms
The Form Tools demo includes four preconfigured forms.
Registration Form
- It's a 4-page form, collecting a variety of information from the user: contact info, emergency contact info, guest info, hotel and travel info.
- It uses the Form Tools API to submit the form contents to Form Tools.
- Before the data is submitted, it includes a final "review" page where users can check everything over to confirm they entered it correctly.
Volunteer Form
- Like the registration form, it uses the Form Tools API to submit the form content.
- It includes a CAPTCHA to prevent spam. This functionality is built into the API.
Contact Form
You can learn more about how the different ways to integrate your forms in the help documentation.
Staff Members
The forms listed above are all found on the public site, where anyone can use them. This form is different: it only exists in Form Tools for use by the administrator. This form lets the administrator keep track of all staff members and take notes on them.Form Tools uses the terms internal and external to differentiate between these form types (i.e. forms found on the public site and only within Form Tools). Read more about the differences here.
Demo Features » Client Acounts
Form Tools lets you create any number of client accounts. "Clients" are people that have been given access to the Form Tools interface to view/manage the form data.
Each account can be configured to see different things: different forms, form content, menu options, export options, data visualizations. You can precisely fine-tune the permissions so they see exactly what you want, change the user interface language and overall theme. You get a lot of control!
In the demo, there are four client accounts:
Peggy Bluth
- The event coordinator.
- She can only see the registration form data - but all of it.
- Her interface is styled with the "Aquamarine" swatch of the Default theme.
Steve Thomson
- The travel coordinator.
- He has access to the hotel and travel info in the registration form, but nothing else. He cannot edit any of the data: just view and download it.
Jenny Schwartz
- The volunteer coordinator.
- When she logs in, she can only see the volunteer form data.
- her interface is set up to use the "Classic Grey" theme.
Ehsan Abbasi
- The website administrator.
- When he logs in, he only sees what people have sent through the contact form.
Demo Features » Modules
Form Tools was designed to be modular. Instead of having to install the entire script, and then wade through
all the features to find the ones you want, you can just pick and choose what functionality you need depending on your
project's requirements. The Form Tools Core contains all the code you need to run the script, but the modules are
where all the fun stuff happens!
The full list of modules is found here; the demo only includes a small subset.
When you're inside the demo's administration section (using the username/password: admin/pass123), click on the Modules navigation link to see what modules have been installed. We won't discuss each and every one here, just a few:
- Data Visualization - this is a premium module which lets you visualize your form data via graphs and charts.
- Report Builder - this is another premium module which displays a simple page of all reports for your forms. Very client-friendly.
- Pages module - this module lets you add arbitrary pages into the Form Tools interface to display whatever information you want.
Demo Features » Graphs & Charts
When you log into the demo under the administrator account (admin / pass123), you'll
see a page like the screenshot to the right. This is a custom page created with the Pages
module, and contains visualizations created by the Data Visualization
module.
The three graphs on the page display the activity on the three public forms: the registration, volunteer and contact forms. In essence, this provides a simple dashboard page for the administrator as soon as they log in. You can add anything you want to the page, including visualizations from any form, and of any size.
On the Submission Listing pages
When you're in your demo, try viewing the submissions for the registration or volunteer form. There, you'll see
a small pie chart icon. Click it and it will open up a dialog window like the screenshot to the right. It
displays any visualizations that have been configured for the form.
To create your own visualizations, just click on the "Data Visualization" link in the left navigation. There, you may create whatever other visualizations you'd like.
Please note, unlike most of the other features in the demo, the Data Visualization module is a premium module.
Demo Features » Reports
The premium Report Builder module is also installed with the demo. It offers a simple, client-friendly interface for
downloading and viewing your form submission data.
Just click on the "Reports" link in the left navigation to see the reports for each of the forms. The screenshot to the right shows how the page typically looks. To add a new report for a form, just create a new form View, containing whatever subset of the form data you want.
Demo Features » Pages module
The pages module was one of the very first Form Tools modules ever written. It lets you add any number of custom
pages to your Form Tools interface. Pages may be written in HTML, PHP or Smarty and contain whatever you want. They
may be assigned to any menu (client or admin). This module is exceedingly useful for helping you customize your Form Tools
interface for different users.
Further Information
This is just the tip of the iceberg! There's oodles more functionality not shown in the demo, so here's a little more information for those of you keen on learning more.
- Documentation - we have some pretty great help documentation.
- The API - the API provides assorted functions for integrating your forms, displaying your data and more.
- Download and install! - alright, enough of the demo already. Time to download and play.
Further Information » Documentation
Form Tools is a very big script! So documenting all the features and functionality was absolutely paramount to help people from getting lost. In addition to each module's documentation, we also have:
| User Documentation | This contains information about how to use the core script. It includes a discussion of all the Core features, what's changed since 2.0.x, what's available and how it works. If you want to learn more about the script, this is the place to start! |
| Installation | How to install Form Tools on your web server (it's easy, really). |
| Upgrading | Instructions on how to upgrade from any previous version of Form Tools. |
| Form Tools API | This section documents the various API functions written for things like integrating Form Tools with your multi-page forms, adding CAPTCHAs, displaying image files - and other tasks like creating and modifying user accounts via PHP rather than through the Form Tools UI. |
| Translations | Everything about the Form Tools translations. How they're made, who they're made by, how to help... |
| Tutorials | Tutorials on various subjects. |
| Core Changelog | The history of changes to the Form Tools Core. |
Further Information » The API
The goal of the API is to provide communication and integration between Form Tools and the
outside world. It contains functionality for tasks such as submitting form submissions via PHP
code rather than POSTing in the information to process.php, accessing and display Form Tools
data in your own webpages, managing client accounts via code rather than the Form Tools
interface and other such stuff.
Further Information » Download and install!
Enough of the demo already! Form Tools is free to download and explore. If you ever have any questions, comments, feature suggestions, angry rants - or anything else - just pop by our forums. We'd love to hear from you.
