What it does

Your authors write news items on the site. They need a title, a text and a photo. The Joomla edit form gives them five tabs with aliases, metadata, access levels, links and publishing options, and you get the phone call when an article ends up in the wrong category.

Article Form Builder lets you decide what that form looks like. In the administrator you build a form profile with drag and drop: which fields are in the form, in which tabs and in which order. You choose the profile on a menu item, and from then on authors who create or edit an article through that menu item get your form instead of the standard one.

News can have a different form than vacancies or events. A menu item without a profile keeps the standard Joomla form.

How it works

1. Create a form profile. Under Components, open Article Form Builder and create a profile. A new profile starts with the complete standard form, so you only have to take away what your authors do not need.
2. Build the form. Drag fields from the list of available fields into a tab, put them in order, rename the tabs and remove the ones you do not use.
3. Assign it to menu items. On the Menu Assignment tab, tick the Category List, Category Blog and Create Article menu items that use the profile. You can also pick the profile on the menu item itself.
4. Done. Authors see your form on the site. The Preview on the site button shows it to you first.

The builder

• Every core field of the article form can be placed: title, alias, article text, tags, category, status, featured and its dates, the publishing dates, access, language, author's alias, both images with their options, the three links and the metadata.
• Drag fields between the list and the tabs, and drag the tabs themselves into order.
• Everything you can drag also works with the keyboard, and the builder announces moves to screen readers.
• Mark a field as required, or show it only when an article is created.
• Give Category, Status, Access, Language and Featured a default value for new articles.
• Choose the buttons under the form: Save, Save & Close and Versions.
• The builder checks your form when you save it: a form without the Title field, or without a category for new articles, is refused with a message that tells you what is missing.

Enforced on the server

A field you leave out of the form is not just invisible. It is dropped from the request when the article is saved, so an author cannot change it by editing the request.

• The profile an article was opened with is remembered on the server and the form carries a signed reference to it. Pointing the request at another menu item does not bypass the profile.
• What the form does not show is kept: tags, the other images and links, the category and the featured dates of an existing article stay as they are.
• An article that was never opened through a profile is saved the standard Joomla way.

Fits your template

The form on the site uses the classes of your template: Bootstrap with Cassiopeia and other templates, UIkit with YOOtheme. This is detected for you and can be set by hand. The layout can be overridden in your template like any other Joomla layout.

When the edit link does not lead to the menu item with the profile, as with the edit button of YOOtheme, the profile of the Category List or Category Blog menu item of the article's category is used.

Tabs with columns (PRO)

Give every tab its own layout: one column, a main and a side column, a side and a main column, or two equal columns. Within a column a field can take the full width, three quarters, half or a quarter, so two dates fit next to each other. On a narrow screen the fields fall back to a width that stays usable.

Hidden fields (PRO)

Hide a field from the author and give it a value. New articles and copies get that value on the server, before Joomla checks the permissions of the category. Existing articles keep their own value.

A news form with the category hidden and set to News always creates news items, whatever the author does.

More in PRO

• Custom fields. Place the published custom fields of your articles in the form, in any tab and column.
• Own labels and help texts. Call the title "Headline" and the intro image "Photo", and tell the author what you expect below the field.
• Free texts. A block of text between the fields, with an optional CSS class: an instruction, a warning or a heading. Its HTML is cleaned when you save the profile and again when the form is shown.
• Default values for every field, not only for category, status, access, language and featured.
• Editor options. Hide the buttons under the editor, and the editor tabs of JCE.
• More buttons. Save as Copy and Move to Trash under the form.

Good to know

• The extension shapes the article form on the site. The article form in the administrator is not changed.
• A profile works on Category List, Category Blog and Create Article menu items of Joomla articles.
• Authors need the usual Joomla permissions to create or edit articles. A profile never gives a user more rights.
• A menu item has one profile. A profile can be used by any number of menu items.

Technical details

• Package with an administrator component, a system plugin and, in PRO, a plugin that adds the custom fields
• Joomla 5.4 or newer and Joomla 6, PHP 8.1 or higher
• One database table, for the form profiles; removed again on uninstall
• No core changes. The form is a plugin layout that a template can override
• Interface in English and Dutch
• Updates through the Joomla update system. An update request to the Joomill update server carries diagnostic headers with site and environment information; the extension installs the shared "Joomill - Update Logging" plugin for this

License

Article Form Builder comes in a FREE and a PRO edition, both licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 or later.

FREE has the builder with tabs, every core field, required fields, fields shown only when creating an article, default values for category, status, access, language and featured, the choice of the Save, Save & Close and Versions buttons, the menu assignment and the enforcement on the server.

PRO adds tabs with two columns, fields at three quarters, half or a quarter of the width, hidden fields with a value, custom fields, your own labels and help texts, free texts, default values for every field, the editor options and the Save as Copy and Move to Trash buttons. A PRO license includes updates and support, and installing PRO over FREE keeps your profiles.

• Documentation: https://www.joomill-extensions.com/documentation/article-form-builder
• Support: https://www.joomill-extensions.com/contact