About Form2Content Forms & Fields

Form2Content forms are used to collect data to generate Joomla articles. Each content type has it's own form. Each form can have as many fields as you like. You can access the Fields Manager by clicking on the  in the Content Type Manager. Please read about article templating on how to get the data from the forms into your Joomla article.

Multi-line text (Text area)

The multi-line text area, also known as a text box is used to add paragraph(s) of text. The best thing about this field is that if users copy/paste from Word or websites, all styling is removed!

Text area settings

The above images show the possible settings including width (columns) and height (rows) of the text area (in the form), the maximum number of characters and possible attributes.

Example attribute:

class="textarea"

placeholder="this text will show in the text area and disappear"

style="width:100%;height: 100px;"

 

Adding the the text area data in your article

The template parameter used to 'paste' the content into the article is very simple and only consists of the unique field name in CAPITALS.

Template parameter: {$FIELDNAME}

*(where FIELDNAME = the unique field name filled out in the settings)

Example: Using part of a text area  as introduction text of your Joomla article

In this example we will create an introduction text from a larger piece of (article) text. For the introduction we will only use the first 200 characters of the main text.

1) Add a text area field to your submission form and call it: article_text

2) In your F2C main template add the template parameter for the field, between div and paragraph tags if you like.

<div>
{$ARTICLE_TEXT}
</div>

3) In your F2C intro template add the following code. This will 'truncate' your text to the desired length and leave the last word in one piece ... thank you Smarty.

<div>
{$ARTICLE_TEXT|truncate:200}
</div>

That's it ... create an article and see if it works. Remember you will need a category blog menu link to the location where you save your Joomla article.

4) Depending on your Joomla article display settings we do not want to show the intro text twice in our Joomla article! There are two ways to prevent this.

A: In the Joomla article manager global settings, set 'display intro' to HIDE. This will now be the standard for all your articles!

B: If you only want it for the articles you are creating using F2C, go to the F2C Content Type Manager. Click on the content type you are using and in the configuration go to the tab called 'Joomla advanced article parameters'.

Select HIDE for display intro text and SAVE. New articles will now override possible global settings and not show the intro text!

If you have already created some articles click on Synchronize at the bottom of the 'Joomla advanced article parameters' tab. Now save and go to the F2C Article Manager. Select your article and refresh. The article parameters for the existing articles have now also been updated.

 

F2C Cheat-sheet

An overview of all template parameters (placeholders for your form data). These are used in your F2C intro and main template to parse the data from your submission forms into the Joomla article.

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