Book Image

ChronoForms 3.1 for Joomla! site Cookbook

By : Bob Janes
Book Image

ChronoForms 3.1 for Joomla! site Cookbook

By: Bob Janes

Overview of this book

Joomla! is a fantastic way to create a dynamic CMS. Now you want to go to the next step and interact with your users. Forms are the way you ask questions and get replies. ChronoForms is the extension that lets you do that and this book tells you how. From building your first form to creating rich form based applications we will cover the features that ChronoForms offers you in a clear hands-on way. Drawing on three years daily experience using ChronoForms and supporting users there is valuable help for new users and experienced developers alike. We will take you through form development step by step: from creating your first form using ChronoForms’ built-in drag-and-drop tool; validating user input; emailing the results; saving data in the database, showing the form in your Joomla! site and much more.Each chapter addresses a topic like ‘validation’ or ‘email’ and the recipes in the chapter each address a different user question from the beginners’ question ‘How do I set up an email?’ through to more advanced questions like using some PHP to create a custom email Subject line.Over eight chapters and eighty recipes we cover all of the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ that new users and developers have about using ChronoForms. The recipe structure allows you to pick and choose just the solution that you need.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
ChronoForms 3.1 for Joomla! Site Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Using Ajax to look up e-mail addresses


We mentioned in a much earlier recipe that we would come back to an Ajax example later. There's a reason for that — it's not very difficult to add Ajax functionality to ChronoForms, but it's not the easiest task in the world either.

We'll walk through a fairly simple example here which will provide you with the basic experience to build more complex applications. You will need some knowledge of JavaScript to follow through this recipe.

Normally, the only communication between the ChronoForms client (the user in their browser) and the server (the website host) is when a page is loaded or a form is submitted. Form HTML is sent to the client and a $_POST array of results is returned. Ajax is a technique, or a group of techniques, that enables communication while the user is browsing the page without them having to submit the form.

As usual, at the browser end the Ajax communication is driven by JavaScript and at the server end we'll be responding using PHP...