The Form Settings may be used to customize the action after submission, permissions, styling, and messages for an individual form.
Basic Settings
When you first create a form, you will be asked to add a form name and description in the form builder. If you would like to make changes, you can edit it in the Settings → General Form Settings page.
- Form Title: Add a name to allow your users to get an overview of the form.
- Form Key: While this is automatically generated based on the form name that you first added, you can still change this if you want.
- Form Description: Add a description to provide information about the form such as instructions, notes, updates, and more.
- Show the form title: Select this checkbox if you would like the form title to be displayed with the form when published.
- Show the form description: Select this checkbox if you would like the form description to be displayed with the form when published.
- Embed button: Easily publish the form on a page/post.
On Submit
Choose what the user sees after an entry is submitted. Select one of the following: Show Message, Redirect to URL, Show Page Content, or Conditional Redirect. Learn more about the Form Confirmation action.
Storing entries
You can choose if you would like to save entries from this form or not. All the entries will be saved automatically unless the Do not store entries submitted from this form is checked. Note: There is no way of retrieving entries that are not saved.
AJAX
Load and save form builder page with AJAX
This is recommended for long forms. Instead of a complete page refresh when you load or update a form, the form will be loaded and saved with Ajax. This will make the load time considerably faster for long forms.
Submit this form with Ajax
Allows the user to submit the form without a page refresh. Ajax refreshes only the form when the user hits Submit by exchanging data with the server and updating parts of a web page without reloading the whole page.
- If your form contains a file upload, rich text, or signature field, it will not be submitted via AJAX. This is a current limitation of the AJAX Submit feature.
- If your form is shown with the confirmation message and Ajax submission is enabled, the form won't have access to the params in the URL. You can either turn off Ajax submission or use this code example to show a message and then redirect.
Validate this form with javascript
Required fields, phone format, email format, and number format can be checked instantly in your browser. After typing into a field the format will be checked, and any error messages for the field will be immediately added or removed without clicking the submit button.
Some types of validation are still run after submit, when communication is needed with the server. This includes unique fields, spam checks, and other PHP validation. Depending on your form, especially if you have any customizations to remove validation messages on certain fields, it may be better to keep javascript validation turned off.
Form Permissions
Limit form visibility and submission
Allows you to choose which user roles can see and submit the form. A logged-in user is someone who is logged in with a WordPress user account on your site before filling out the form. Note: Even if you don't publish your form, it may be accessible via the preview URL. If you do not want unauthorized users submitting your form, we recommend that you set the form visibility to prevent this.
Limit number of form entries
You may choose to limit number of form entries to one per logged-in user, IP address, or saved cookie.
Allow front-end editing of entries
This will allow certain users to edit form submissions. You may allow a particular user role to edit their own submissions or all form submissions. To learn more about editing responses, click here.
Protect all files uploaded in this form
This file permissions option will appear when the form includes a file upload field. When enabled, uploaded files cannot be accessed directly using the file URL. It prevents files from being indexed and searchable by Google and other search engines.
You may also restrict any files uploaded in a form to be restricted to a specific user role. Anyone without this role will see an error message when trying to access files they don't have permission to view.
Prevent search engines from indexing uploads
This option requires File protection to be enabled and is applied for new files before the entry has been submitted.
If you are using Apache and want to prevent indexing uploads without file protection, you can configure your htaccess file to prevent bots from indexing specific paths.
Copy this form to other blogs
Allows you to copy the current form network-wide when Formidable Forms is activated. This setting only shows up when it's a multisite network.
- In the form Settings → Form Permissions, select the checkbox Copy this form to other blogs when Formidable Forms is activated.
- Install and activate Formidable Forms on the new subsite.
- It will automatically copy the form but not the entries. This option works for both the master site and subsites. It will not copy the form to sites where Formidable Forms is already activated.
Save and Continue forms
Allow logged-in users to save drafts
Allows the logged-in user to save a partially completed form as a draft. A logged-in user is someone who is logged in with a WordPress user account on your site before filling out the form. When the user returns to the form, he/she can continue where they left off. Users can save their draft as many times as they would like, but once it is submitted, it cannot be reverted to a draft. Each user can only have one draft at a time.
If you have set your emails to trigger when a Draft is saved, only the first draft is saved.
Additionally, when this option is enabled for multipage forms, a draft will be saved automatically each time a user goes from one page to another, regardless of if they are moving from Page 1 to Page 2, or Page 1 to Page 4.
Save draft text
Go to your form Settings → Buttons page and change the Save Draft text.
Saved draft message
Go to your form Settings → Form Permissions page and check the Allow logged-in users to save drafts box to customize the message that will be shown after a form is saved as a draft.
Change Save draft link to a button
Go to your form Settings → Customize HTML → Submit button section and replace the existing '[if save_draft]' with this:
[if save_draft]<a href="#" tabindex="0" class="frm_save_draft frm_form_submit_style" [draft_hook]>[draft_label]</a>[/if save_draft]
Allow multiple drafts
Since each user can only have one draft at at time, you could still allow your users to create multiple drafts by creating an entry status field.
- Go to the form builder page.
- Add a dropdown field and label it as Entry Status.
- Add Draft and Final as the dropdown options.
A user can indicate if they're submitting a draft or the final entry by choosing the status from the Entry Status dropdown. If the entries are being used in a View, add a filter in the Advanced View settings to only show entries where the Entry Status is equal to Final.
Form Scheduling
Set your form to open at a later date or close automatically to stop accepting entries. While open, the form will appear wherever the form shortcode is used. When closed, the 'Form Closed Message' will appear in place of the form.
To set a specific time, use HH:MM format. For example, to open the form at 8:30 AM, use 08:30 for the time. To open at 1:30 PM, use 13:30. This time will use the timezone set in your WordPress settings.
- Open - By default, the form is always open and will accept submissions indefinitely.
- Closed - Set 'Closed' as the form status to manually close the form at any time.
- Schedule - Schedule the form to open and/or close on specific dates.
- Limit Entries - Close the form after a specified number of entries have been collected in the form. This is based on the total count of entries in the form.
- Schedule and Limit Entries - Schedule the form by date and limit by the number of entries in the form. When both a close date and limit are set, the form will be closed based on which is reached first.
Pagination
Formidable Forms Pro includes the option to include a progress bar or rootline in multipage forms. This setting is visible when the form includes at least one page break field.
Default Progress Bar
Default Rootline
Displaying Pagination
By default, a multipage form will hide both the progress bar and rootline from appearing. However, you have three options to choose from.
- Hide Progress bar and Rootline
- Show Progress bar
- Show Rootline
Changing Position
When displaying pagination with your multipage form, you can use the position setting to determine where the rootline and progress bar will be placed. You have four options to choose from.
- Below form title (default)
- Above form title
- Above submit button
- Below submit button
Showing Page Titles
When you show either a Progress bar or a Rootline in your form, you have the option of showing page titles for each page. If you would like to enable this feature, simply check the box labeled 'Show page titles with steps' and then enter a page title for each page in your form. Please note: If you leave any of these fields blank, your progress bar or rootline will have no title for the respective page.
Resulting Progress Bar & Rootline
Hide Page Numbers
By default, the Progress bar or Rootline will show page numbers. To disable this feature, simply check the box labeled 'Hide the page numbers' and then update your form.
Resulting Progress Bar & Rootline
Hiding Pagination Lines
By default, the Progress bar will show a vertical line separating each page in the progress bar. Similarly, the Rootline will show a horizontal line connecting each page in the form. If you would like to hide these lines, simply check the box labeled 'Hide lines in the rootline or progress bar' and then update your form.
Resulting Progress Bar & Rootline
Buttons
Page Turn Transitions
Choose transition effects that can be used on form load. Select from these options: Slide horizontally and Slide vertically. By default, this is set to None.
If you have set up a multi-page form, select AJAX submit in your form settings for a smoother page turn transition effect.
Submit Button Text
Set the text for your Submit button.
Update Button Text
Set the text for your Update button. This box will only appear if you check 'Allow front-end editing of entries'.
Start Over Button
Use the Start over button to restore the form to its original state before any values were added to the fields. When this option is enabled, it includes an option to customize the button text.
Submit Button
Submit Button Position
Choose to have the Submit button centered, full width, inline, none, or default.
- Default: By default, the submit button will sit below all the fields in your form.
- Center: Adds the submit button at the center of the form below all the fields.
- Full Width: Set your submit button style width to 100%.
- Inline: Align the submit button with all the fields on the same line.
Submit Button Styling
By default, the disabled submit button is displayed at half opacity. To turn off this styling, select the Disable submit button styling checkbox in Formidable → Styles → Buttons.
Submit Button Logic
The submit button includes options to either conditionally hide or disable it. These settings apply to the submit button on the last page of the form, and not a next button added by a page break field.
Click Use conditional logic, and add settings to hide or disable the submit button. This works just like the field conditional logic. The logic includes the option to hide the submit button until a checkbox is checked.
By default, conditional logic is triggered when the field is changed, which doesn't occur until the cursor leaves the field. To trigger this when a keyboard key is released, you can use this Javascript example instead.
Restrict email addresses
To restrict certain email addresses in your form, you can follow the steps below:
- Add an HTML field with a validation message. You could add some CSS styling, if you want.
- Add conditional logic to the HTML field such that it will only show if the email address field is like @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, or @yahoo.com.
- Go to your form Settings → Buttons page and select Add conditional logic to submit button. Set it to disable the submit button if the email address field is like @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, or @yahoo.com.
Messages
As of version 6.0, messages can be edited using the Success Confirmation form action. You can add any values from the submitted entry to your confirmation message. Use the links and buttons in the right sidebar to add fields from your form. You can add text and HTML in this box.
To customize the message seen when you submit an entry, learn more about how to show a message with Confirmation form action.
To customize the message seen after an entry is updated, learn more about how to show a message after editing. This box will only appear if the Allow front-end editing of entries checkbox is checked.
To customize the message seen after an entry is saved as a draft, learn more about how to edit the saved draft message.
Related developer hooks
- Enable saving drafts by default for newly created forms with the frm_new_form_values hook.
- Enable file protection by default for newly created forms with the frm_new_form_values hook.