The Form Settings may be used to customize the action after submission, permissions, styling, and messages for an individual form.
Each form also has its own GDPR settings tab, where you can add a GDPR agreement field and automatically delete old entries (paid version). Learn more in Form GDPR settings.
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Basic settings
When you first create a form, you will be asked to add a form name and description in the form builder. To make changes, edit them on 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 to display the form title with the form when published.
- Show the form description: Select this checkbox to display the form description with the form when published.
- Include form into applications: Add the form to one of your applications. The dropdown lists the applications you've created in Formidable → Applications.
- Embed: Click this button at the top of the page to publish the form on a page or post.
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On submit
Choose what happens after an entry is submitted. To change this setting and the AJAX settings below, go to the form's Settings → General page.
Storing entries
You can choose whether to save entries from this form. All the entries will be saved automatically unless Do not store entries submitted from this form is checked.
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 clicks Submit. It exchanges data with the server and updates parts of the page without reloading the whole page.
- If your form contains a signature or rich text 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, it may be better to keep javascript validation turned off. This is especially true if you have customizations that remove validation messages on certain fields.
Form permissions
These settings are available on the Basic, Plus, Business, and Elite licenses.
To change form permissions, go to the form's Settings → Form Permissions page.
Limit form visibility
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.
Limit number of entries
Limit the number of entries and avoid duplicates. Check Limit number of entries per, then select one or more ways to recognize the person submitting the form.
- Logged-in User. Count entries per logged-in user. If this option is not selected, users can submit multiple entries.
- IP Address. Count entries per IP address.
- Saved Cookie. Count entries from the same browser with a cookie. Set how long the cookie lasts in the Cookie Expiration box, in hours. The default is 720 hours (30 days).
- Email Address. Count entries per email address entered in the form. This option appears when the form has an Email field. If the form has more than one, choose the field to check in the Email Address Field dropdown. This option is selected automatically when you click Update on a form with a unique Email field. It happens only with the default limit of 1 in total.
Next, set the Maximum Entries. This is the number of entries allowed and the time period they're counted in.
- in total: The count never resets. This is the default. The default limit of 1 in total allows 1 entry per person.
- hour, day, week, month, or year: The count resets with each new period. Enter the length of the period after per, such as 3 per 1 week. With a length of more than 1, the options change to hours, days, weeks, months, and years.
Time periods follow the calendar in your site's timezone. An hour starts on the hour, a day at midnight, and a week on the Week Starts On day from Settings → General in WordPress. A month starts on the 1st, and a year on January 1st.
With a longer period, the current one counts together with the ones before it. For example, 2 per 3 months counts entries submitted since April 1st when it's June.
Only submitted entries count toward the limit. Drafts don't count.
When someone reaches the limit, a message is shown in place of the form. For the default limit of 1 in total, it's the Previously Submitted Message. For any other limit, it's the Submission Limit Message. Edit both in Formidable → Global Settings → Message Defaults.
Allow front-end editing of entries
This will allow certain users to edit form submissions. You can allow a particular user role to edit their own submissions or all form submissions. Learn more about how to set up front-end editing.
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 can also restrict any files uploaded in a form 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.
When the role is set to Everyone, logged-out visitors can open a protected file only from a link on your site, such as in a View. Opening the file link directly, for example by pasting it into the browser, shows the error message.
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, they can continue where they left off.
Users can save their draft as many times as they want, but once it is submitted, it cannot be reverted to a draft. Each user can only have one draft at a time.
- Go to your form Settings → Form Permissions page.
- Select the Allow saving drafts checkbox.
- In the dropdown field next to it, select Logged-in Users.
- To enable saving drafts for logged-out users, get the Form abandonment add-on available in the premium plugin. When it's active, this page also shows its settings, such as Save drafts automatically and Create a save and resume email.
- If you have set your emails to trigger when a Draft is saved, only the first draft is saved.
- When this option is turned on for multipage forms, a draft is saved automatically every time a user navigates between pages, whether from Page 1 to Page 2 or Page 1 to Page 4.
Save draft text
Go to your form Settings → Form Permissions page and select the Allow saving drafts checkbox to customize the text that will be shown after a form is saved as a draft.
Saved draft message
Go to your form Settings → Form Permissions page and check the Allow saving drafts checkbox to customize the message that will be shown after a form is saved as a draft.
Save draft button
The Save Draft option shows as a button next to the Submit button. To see its HTML, go to your form Settings → Customize HTML page and find the Submit Button box. The button is the code from [if save_draft] to [/if save_draft]:
[if save_draft]<button class="frm_save_draft" [draft_hook]>[draft_label]</button>[/if save_draft]
To change the button's text, edit the Save draft text.
Allow multiple drafts
Since each user can only have one draft at a time, you can 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.
Go to your form Settings → Form Scheduling page and choose an option in the Form Status dropdown.
To set a specific time, click the Open Form On or Close Form On box. Pick the date, then the hour, minutes, and AM or PM.
The box then shows the time in 24-hour format, such as 13:30 for 1:30 PM. 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, close, or both on specific dates.
- Limit Entries. Close the form after a specified number of entries have been collected in the form. Enter the number in the Entry Limit box. 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.
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.
The messages shown when someone reaches an entry limit are set for all forms in Formidable → Global Settings → Message Defaults.
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.
