Web forms are a great way to collect information from your visitors, from feedback forms to registrations. Not only can you have the responses to these forms sent to you via e-mail, they will also be collected in a database in Drupal that can be viewed by you online, or exported as a text file that you can import to Excel or a database.
Creating the Page
- Under Create Content, select "Webform" If you don't see this option, let me know and I can install it for you.
- The first screen you'll see looks like your standard content editing page. This will be the text shown above your form. You can use this for introduction, instructions, etc.
- When you are done, click the "Save" button like you normally would. You will now see "Webform" and "Results" tabs in addition to the normal "View" and "Edit" tabs.
Adding Fields to the Form
- To add fields to your form, make sure you have the "Webform" tab and the "Form Components" sub-tab selected.
- To add a field, enter it's name in the space under the "Label" column.
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Next, select the type of field it is:
- Date: Used to collect dates in a consistent format
- E-mail: Used to make sure they enter valid e-mails. You will also want to have an e-mail field on your form so results can be sent to the person filling out the form.
- Fieldset: This is used to group similar fields by putting a box around them. Great for longer forms.
- File: Use this if you want people to be able to attach files to their submission
- Grid: Good for doing survey type questions
- Hidden: This is used if you want information submitted with each form but the user will not be entering. You probably won't need this.
- Markup: This is used if you want to add your own HTML in the middle of a form, usually for extra formatting purposes.
- Numer: Makes sure people are entering a number.
- Page Break: Used for very long forms.
- Select Options: This is used if you want to give people a fixed set of choices, either through a drop down menu, radio buttons, or checkboxes.
- Textarea: Used if you are collecting multiple rows of text
- Textfield: Used if you are collecting a small amount of text, like a word or short phrase.
- Time: Used to collect times in a consistent format
- The "Mandatory" checkbox should be checked if this is something people must fill out. Good for their e-mail field, and name fields in particular.
- Click the "Add" button to create the field.
- Depending on the field type, you will have different options on this details page. The instructions next to them is fairly good, but if you have questions on any of them, just let me know.
- Click "Save Component" at the bottom of the form to add the field to your form.
- You can add as many fields as you'd like this way. They can be rearranged by dragging the cross arrows as on other pages.
Additional Features
- The "E-mails" sub-tab allows you to have the system send you or the user e-mails about the information they entered into the form. This is not done automatically, so you can customize this to your needs.
- The "Form Settings" sub-tab is where you put the text people will see after they've submitted the form. Typically this is a thank you and letting people know what the next steps may be. This tab is also where you can limit who can submit a form and how many times someone can submit it.
Viewing the Results
The "Results" tab let you see what people have entered into the form.
- "Submissions" gives you a way to view the details of individual entries.
- "Analysis" will do basic statistics on the submissions so far
- "Table" will give you a grid of all of the information submitted.
- "Download" lets you save all of information submitted to your computer so you can open it in Excel or a database program for mail merges, statistics, etc.
- "Clear" allows you to delete all of the submissions. Good if you use the same form for multiple things and don't want old data kept.