Introducing Form Templates

Form templates are great!

Is it possible for us to add additional info and tips etc?

For example it would be nice if we can group by section or add headings, eg:

# My details

- type: input
  id: name
  attributes:
    label: "My first name"
    placeholder: "Please enter your first name here"
  validations:
    required: true

- type: input
  id: surname
  attributes:
    label: "My surname"
    placeholder: "Please enter your surname here"
  validations:
    required: true

# Company details

- type: input
  id: name
  attributes:
    label: "My company name"
    placeholder: "Company name"
  validations:
    required: true

...etc

It would also be good to use a form to compose the title.

Being able to add notes (that do not show in the final thread) would be good too, for example:


**Please note all threads in this section are reviewed before being made live.** 

- Please do not post the same thread more than once.
- This section is for ____ only.
- Please post in English.
- If possible please come back and post a note in the thread to let us know when...
- etc

Edit: it would be nice to have notes that do also remain with the thread too.

1 Like

There is a feature request you might be interested in voting for:

3 Likes

This would be incredibly useful for being able to switch between ā€œform modeā€ and ā€œregular modeā€ :grimacing:

2 Likes

+1 to that, the use case is very clear: mixing form-templated posts with other types of content.

We have an ā€˜tech-apps’ category where we can post just apps but then we have wikis and general topics there. On the current behavior we need to disable form templates entirely because it breaks the common posting actions.

A simple switch could be a nice adition to consider :slight_smile:

1 Like

This is a great feature and I’m excited about the possibility of replacing our somewhat clunky use of Category Template. However, I ran into some roadblocks for our use cases. Hence, providing some feedback as requested.

Post body customization

Our main wish would be to be able to format the created post; we’d like to have at least some control over that output. This could either be a separate field while editing/setting up the form, or even in yaml it could be along the lines of:

output: |
  Some preset intro text goes here.

  šŸ—ŗ **{{ field_id_1.label }}**  {{ field_id_1.data }}

  Some other custom text

  šŸ“… **Our own label:**:
  {{ field_id_2.data }}, {{ field_id_3.data }}

  Something else entirely that makes sense on the post and not on the form since it's not related with filling it.

The form fields specify an id attribute and I was hoping I could use that to format the post output with CSS. However, they don’t seem to be on the output at all. Thinking about it, this would only work if editing the post would return back to editing the form as otherwise I’m guessing that structure would/could be lost upon editing the post. Being back to the form when editing the post would actually work very nicely for us and would help enforcing the validation which is currently trivial to ignore/bypass.

I suppose what I’m looking for is less a Form Templates and more of a Structured Topics feature of sorts which may be specific to my use cases… but maybe I’m not alone on this?

Title customization

Being able to also customize the topic title based on a combination of the form input would a nice feature too and I suppose it would be an natural extension of the suggestion above. Anyhow, this not a must for us, but a nice to have.

Optional fields

Lastly, — and I’m not sure if I may have missed something —, but it would be nice to specify that an input field is not to be included on the post. This is useful for things like checkboxes one needs to ā€œagree toā€ when filling the form but that don’t need to be on the post.