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New: Mobius Forms App - The Most Customizable Form in DNN (and not DAFT)

This new Forms App is the most generic, customizable forms-system in the DNN Ecosystem. This is because it's Non-DAFT, meaning that techies can use HTML, JS and C# to customize everything. So pure code instead of extensive GUIs missing just-that-one-feature.

What's In The App

The first public version 01.02 (download) has loads of power already included, like:

  1. Simple form to start with, and demos of forms which show/hide sections or have a generic amount of fields (styled with bootstrap3).
  2. Submit using AJAX to a default but easily exchangable, customizable WebApi
  3. Loads of features like optional Recaptcha, e-mail templating with Razor and more
  4. HTML5 validation with polyfill
  5. Multi-language everything
  6. Data management, export for excel, etc.
  7. Save to fields in a content-type and save to JSON (RawData)
  8. And way more - with documentation :) check out the GitHub Wiki

Some Screens of the Mobius Forms App for DNN

Role Separation for Editors / Developers

The basic setup is simple:

  • an editor can add any of the prepared forms and configure basic settings like Owner-E-Mail, CC-Mails-to, Subject and optionally an choose an alternate action on submit
  • the editor can also view submissions, search/sort/delete and export
  • developers can create more prepared forms using standard HTML/JS
  • developers can create alternate configurations for the save-process, using other content-types, other mail-templates or even other WebApis

100% Customizable With Standard-Tech

We're very keen on non-DAFT solutions (see blog). So Mobius Forms requires an expert (like a web-master / developer) to provide customization - like custom content-types, custom forms, custom mail-templates etc. This is because beginners tend to think they can do it, but quickly configure something which doesn't fully work - as they don't understand the scope / consequences of their actions. So in our experience it's better to leave this to experts.

And since experts / developers would prefer to use existing know-how like HTML jQuery to build cool forms, all this is done exactly that way. So for customizing, you will:

  1. Use HTML to design the form
  2. Use jQuery for special show/hide behavior
  3. Use Content-Types to define new tables, with fields of the data type you need
  4. Use C# WebApi to customize the existing process, or create more endpoints
  5. Use Razor to template the e-mails
  6. Use standard App-Settings for configuration (like Recaptcha keys)
  7. Use standard App-Resources for multilanguage labels / messages
  8. etc.

So: no more "working around the functionality of something" but just getting your hands dirty, and doing anything you want with it. 

Open Source and Git

As always it's all 100% Open-Source and published on Github. Download the installable package in the app-catalog.

Enjoy

Love from Switzerland,

iJungleboy


Daniel Mettler grew up in the jungles of Indonesia and is founder and CEO of 2sic internet solutions in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, an 20-head web specialist with over 800 DNN projects since 1999. He is also chief architect of 2sxc (see github), an open source module for creating attractive content and DNN Apps.

Read more posts by Daniel Mettler