Deprecated

This module has been deprecated as part of Zikula 4 slimming diet.

Formicula Zikula Module

A template-driven form mailer for Zikula. Formicula is a highly configurable contact mailer solution for Zikula Application Framework. You can create any kind of contact form with any number contact fields by changing templates. Forms can be controlled by permissions. It also supports multiple, permission controlled recipients, configurable notification emails, a simple captcha for spam protection, hooks to the Captcha module, javascript form validation and file uploads.

Main branch

The 6.0.x versions in the main branch target Zikula 3.0+.

Older versions

See releases.

Installation

1. Extract the files to your Zikula extensions directory.
2. Initialize and activate Formicula in the extensions administration.
3. During installation, Formicula tries to create a public/formicula/cache directory containing a .htaccess file. If this fails (should happen very rarely), you will be notified and have to create them on your own: a) Create a directory public/formicula/cache and make it writable for the web server (e.g. chmod 777). b) Create a .htacess file within that directory containing the following lines to allow access to the images created for the captcha:

   SetEnvIf Request_URI "\.gif$" object_is_gif=gif
   SetEnvIf Request_URI "\.png$" object_is_png=png
   SetEnvIf Request_URI "\.jpg$" object_is_jpg=jpg
   Order deny,allow
   Deny from all
   Allow from env=object_is_gif
   Allow from env=object_is_png
   Allow from env=object_is_jpg

4. Create some contact names/topics with respective email adresses in the Formicula admin setion. Upon installation, Formicula creates a default contact with the admins mail address.
5. Add a basic permission rule, e.g. Unregistered (group) | ZikulaFormiculaModule::. | . | comment This enables unregistered users to use all existing forms. In a default installation the users group has a generic comment permission to do the same.
6. Add a link to your main menu using /contact as URL (whereby contact corresponds to the module name defined for Formicula in the extensions list). This uses form 0. To call a specific form id use /contact/?form=<formid> e.g. /contact/?form=5 to use form #5 In the distribution package you will find sample forms 0, 1, 2 and 3. 0 is a normal contact form and form #1 and beyond are more extensive forms.

Configuration

• Show xxx: quick configuration enable/disable some fields in the userform. These fields may be (read: surely will be) removed in future versions.
• Send confirmation email to user: Tick this to send an confirmation mail to the user directory for uploaded files: Uploaded files get stored here. Make sure this directory is secured with a .htaccess file!
• Delete file after sending: does what it says when ticked.
• Activate spamcheck: shows a little captcha in the form

Contacts

Each contact consists of several information:

• Contact name or Topic: The name that is shown to the user in the form, e.g. Webmaster
• Email: The email to send the data to
• Public: tick this to make the contact available for use.
• Sender name: senders name as used in the users confirmation mail
• Sender email: senders email address as used in the users confirmation mail, e.g noreply@example.com
• Subject: enter a static subject or use these placeholders:
  • %s = sitename
  • %l = slogan
  • %u = site url
  • %c = contact name
  • %n = user defined field name
  • %d = user defined field data

Using own contacts

It is possible to pass own contacts to formicula instead using the formicula database. To do this by a link you have to call the addSessionOwncontacts function in the User-API. This function will return you an integer which you should append with the index 'owncontacts' to the URL pointing to formicula. If you want to embed your form you can pass the owncontacts directly to the form by adding the owncontacts array to your arguments array.

The owncontacts array should contain the following values (per item) in both cases:

• name the contact full name (required)
• sname the contact secure name wich will be send to the submitter (optional)
• email the contact email (required)
• semail the contact email wich will be send to the submiter (optional)
• ssubject the subject of the confirmation mail (optional)

Templates

Everything you want to do with the form is handled in the templates. Store them in Resources/views/Form/ The '#' at the beginning of the template designates the number of form.

The templates for the forms are named as follows:

• The form with the input fields: Form/#/userForm.html.twig
• The page with the confirmation after submitting the data: Form/#/userConfirm.html.twig
• The page with error messages after submitting data: Form/#/userError.html.twig
• The user's confirmation mail in text format: Form/#/userMail.txt.twig
• The user's confirmation mail in html format: Form/#/userMail.html.twig
• The admin mail in text format: Form/#/adminMail.txt.twig
• The admin mail in html format: Form/#/adminmail.html.twig

This is the email that the admin gets after the user sends submits the userform.

Standard fields

The standard fields to be used in forms are under userdata

• userdata[uname]: the users name (mandatory)
• userdata[uemail]: the users name (mandatory)
• userdata[url]: the users homepage (optional)
• userdata[location], userdata[phone], userdata[company]: these are obvious... (optional)
• userdata[comment]: normally a textarea for entering free text. Since 0.6 this is not longer a mandatory field! HTML is stripped from the comments to avoid spam. In addition, the comment is send to Zikula's internal censor function. If the result differs from the original comment, the submission is also treated as spam and not sent. This results in an error message.
• captcha: mandatory if spamcheck feature is enabled, see 0_userform.html for an example

Custom fields

You can add as many custom fields to your form as you want. This makes it easy to create e.g. an online job application form if needed.

This makes it necessary to send certain information from the form page to the module. The custom fields are numbered in old versions and an associative array in newer versions.

These are:

• custom[fieldname][name] (hidden field) name of the custom field can be used in the confirmation email
• custom[fieldname][mandatory] (hidden field) set to 1 if this is a mandatory field. Formicula checks this and shows an errormessage when this field is not filled
• custom[fieldname][data] (any kind of input field) the data with fieldname the payload

Example:

<label class="mandatory" for="foobar">{% trans %}foobar{% endtrans %}</label><br />
<input type="hidden" name="custom[foobar][name]" value="{% trans %}foobar{% endtrans %}" />
<input type="hidden" name="custom[foobar][mandatory]" value="1" />
<input type="text" required name="custom[foobar][data]" id="foobar" size="35" maxLength="80" value="{{ customFields.foobar.data|default|e('html_attr') }}" />

Permissions

To use a form you need the right to COMMENT.

Unregistered | ZikulaFormiculaModule:: | .* | comment all unregistered users are allowed to use all forms and write to all contacts

Unregistered | ZikulaFormiculaModule:: | 0:: | comment all unregistered users are allowed to use form 0 with all existing contacts.

Users | ZikulaFormiculaModule:: | 1:(2|3): | comment all members of the group Users are allowed to use form 1 and write to contact 2 and 3.

Use external information in the forms

You can use external information in the form by sending them in the url used to call the form. These data are send in an associative array addinfo where the key is the name.

With

/contact/?form=2&addinfo[tid]=4&addinfo[pid]=17

you send two different information to the form 2 which can used in the userform template (in this example 2_userform.html) with

{{ addinfo.tid }} => 4
{{ addinfo.pid }} => 17

As you can see you can use this to e.g. load data from Pagesetter in the userform template.

Client side input validation

The supplied templates use a html5 input validation with webshims lib polyfill fallback.

Captcha

The simplecaptcha plugins adds an image with a very basic math equation (3 number from 1 to 2 and either +, - or *) to the form if the spam check is enabled. If the user enters a wrong value, Formicula redirects back to the page where it came from.

Formicula tries to create images in this order: gif, jpg, png. If all these image types are not supported by your server, captchas are deactivated, in this case Formicula turns the configuration option "Activate spamcheck" off. Please refer to https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.image.php for more information.

Formicula also supports ztemp-directories located outside the websites root directory. In this case (when the temp directory points to an absolute path) the image is delivered by an internal function and not linked directly.