Using Joomla

Forms: Create Custom Forms to Collect and Store Information with bfForms

• Extension: bfForms

• Website: http://www.forms-for-joomla.com

• Cost: £29.99 GBP (approximately $50 USD)

• License: GNU/GPL

• Minimum requirements: PHP 5.2.4+

bfForms, formerly known as Joomla Forms, gives website owners the ability to create a wide variety of forms for their website. This isn’t just a generic form-building component—there’s a lot of power behind it. Whether you need to create a drop-down list that is populated from fields in the database, send user submitted data to an API, or just create a basic form, bfForms can do it.

If you have a concern about spam protection, IP addresses of submitters are checked against two blacklist databases. This means if a form is submitted from a known spammer, bfForms will stop the submission and you won’t get an email. You also have the ability to manually blacklist IP addresses.

If security is a concern, you can force forms to only submit over https/ssl. Forms submitting over https/ssl will find that the data is encrypted as it travels over the Internet from the visitor’s computer to your website’s server. This is the same level of protection that banks use on their websites.

We wish we could tell you that bfForms was really easy to use the first time you try to make a form, but there’s a bit of a trade-off to provide all the features. However, once you get through your first form, it gets easier and the concepts start to make sense. Remembering these steps ...