Developer’s Blog

Create From a Form on Another Website

Mar 13, 2008 Howto, Introducing

There is a new feature available that I think is quite interesting. I realized that a lot of you were spending a lot of time Re-Creating forms that already exist on your site. And, while this is great if you are starting fresh, it wastes a lot of your precious time if you just want to enhance your current forms with BestContactForm.com.

So, there is now a new link when creating a new form called: Create from a form on another website, which will try to generate a form in the form builder based on a form at another website.

If you thought that was neat, listen to this:
If all goes well, you can then simply change 2 lines on your existing form, and your form will now be running off BestContactForm.com with all the benefits. There is no need to change your form element’s variable names, as our system will be smart enough to map them to your bestcontactform.com’s form.

Here’s how it works:

1. You simply enter in a URL of the page that your current form resides on.
2. Choose a simple thank you page (more likely), or have it repost to your form. The repost will enable advanced integration.
3. Click Next Step

Magical Things Occur
Now, our system will visit that URL and attempt to parse out all forms on the page. If there are multiple forms, it will ask you to choose the correct one. If there was only one form it will try and build the form with our form builder. It will extract the title of your  page and use that as the form name, it can grab the form’s ACTION and use that to repost the variables, and it will build as many elements as it can, including drop downs, check boxes, textarea, textboxes, passwords, etc.

You should instantly have a form if things go well. Sometimes, if your HTML is improper, it may not be able to parse the form data. So, at the very least make sure all your tags have matching closing tags You can leave things as they are, or you can change the question names. They will default to the variable names of your existing form.

Now, all you have to do is change the ACTION of your form, and add the captcha code (if enabled). By the way, you can disable captcha codes and play with the style by clicking the advanced tab.

The full instructions will be in the Get HTML code tab.

And, as always, it’s a good idea to insert your tracking code on every page of your site, to ensure optimal keyword tracking.

Have Fun!

- Brian

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Tags: auto generate contact form duplicate web form