1: Form Builder - Formatting the resulting email
Posted by DaveP on 17/03/15 18:34

Hi,

I would love to have a way of formatting the email that each form sends. Basically I would like a block of free text associated with the form into which the values entered by the user are inserted with <name> substitutions.

I suspect that this is there in the underlying system but I cannot see any way of exposing it.

Have I overlooked something or, if not, could I submit this as a feature request please? 

Many thanks

Dave Plummer - Bracondale Residents' Association Web Admin 

2: Re: Form Builder - Formatting the resulting email (response to 1)
Posted by Voice Admin on 19/03/15 14:00

Hi Dave,

There's no current way that you can do that in the system. Although you can create mail templates and use substitutions for contacting your members, the form builder tool can't use these templates.

I have noted the request, but since it's really very niche functionality then I don't think it's going to be high up the priority queue I'm afraid!

Thanks

Joe - Voice Admin

3: Re: Form Builder - Formatting the resulting email (response to 2)
Posted by Felix on 19/03/15 15:16

Hi Joe,

We do use forms on the Tewin Village site.  I've always thought the emails resulting from forms are rather clunky, and I suspect they might put some sites off using forms.  I appreciate you have to prioitise development requests, but should the request to have templates for these emails rise to the top of your list, we will use them.

Regards,

Felix

(Felicia Green, Tewin Village site)

4: Re: Form Builder - Formatting the resulting email (response to 3)
Posted by Voice Admin on 19/03/15 15:30

We had imagined that the emails generated from the form builder would generally be going to administrators, who wouldn't be too bothered about what the email looked like, as long as it contained the information in a usable format!

It would be easy for me to tidy up the generated email to make it clearer if you think that'd help (and especially if you can suggest how it would be better formatted). If you have thoughts on this then please do let me know.

However, adding templates would be a lot more work, and also relatively complicated for administrators to use them (especially if you wanted to be able to place individual form values in different parts of the email - I can imagine users finding this over-complicated!)

Thanks

Joe - Voice Admin

5: Re: Form Builder - Formatting the resulting email (response to 4)
Posted by Felix on 19/03/15 16:40

Hi Joe,

Thanks for posting back so quickly.  All good points.

Our site covers lots of village clubs & societies, so, say, a contact form on the Bridge Club Page might be used only occasionally, and sent to the person organising the Bridge Club - that person not having much directly to do with the village web site, and sometimes not all that comfortable with email itself.

I would like to see the name of the website stand out more, to give the recepient more of a clue where the email has come from, and then just to list the questions and answers, without any extra words.

I would suggest something along the lines of:

 

 

 

Voice

<Website name>

A <form name> form has been submitted:

<Question 1>:
     <Answer 1>

<Question 2>:
    <Answer 2 line 1>
    <Answer 2 line 2>
    <Answer 2 line 3>

 

etc.

 

Regards,

Felix

(Felicia Green, Tewin Village website)

6: Re: Form Builder - Formatting the resulting email (response to 5)
Posted by DaveP on 19/03/15 23:06

Hi All,

Assuming that a fully flexible template is not on the cards then the format suggested by Felix above would be helpful to me. 

I would like something that looks clean and to the point and that could be parsed automatically or at least pasted directly into Excel. Something like the above would be OK from those viewpoints. 

Thanks

Dave

(Dave Plummer, Bracondale Residents' Association)