Evaluating Plone form mailer

With Plone Form mailer, you can design email forms through the web. We at Vasudeva Server have had occasion to use them a lot.

Their best point is the ease with which you can actually get a form drummed up and ready on your site. The ‘edit’ tab lets you enter text before and after the form, configure who to send it to, sort out what the email is going to look like, and design a ‘thank-you’ page. The ‘modify form(zmi)’ tab lets you work on the form itself.

The edit tab

The fields to enter in the ‘edit’ tab are pretty intuitive (and have
been made more so in recent versions). There are a couple of times
where you have to enter a TALES expression, like the mail recipient or
the email address of recipient. For example, if your name is Mr Happy
and your email address is happy@happy.com then enter string:Mr Happy and string:happy@happy.com in the relevant fields. One nice feature is they warn you what bits not to touch if you haven’t a clue what youre doing!

The ‘modify form’ tab
By default, the form has a field for name, email and message. One
recent improvement to Plone Form mailer is that the whole form doesnt
fall apart if for some reason you delete the email field. Clicking on
the tab takes you to a ZMI interface where you can see a menu
containing each of the fields. You can add more fields by clicking on
the top right, including checkboxes, radiofields, you name it.

Issues
Sometimes we have had problems implementing PloneFormMailer using
scripts other than Roman (eg Cyrillic). Sometimes the checkboxes dont
work and the characters are not correctly interpreted in the email.

One issue is that form mailers invariably always present problems when migrating Plone, and usually have to be deleted and recreated again. However PloneFormMailer is quite young and we would expect this to be sorted out in the future.

You can read more about Plone Form Mailer on their section  of  the Plone site

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