Forms and submissions

A form on your site needs somewhere to store incoming messages. In Nimbu that is a channel. Every submission becomes an item, and the fields of the form are the fields of the channel.

The demo channel Contact works this way. It has fields for first name, name, email address, phone number and message, plus a boolean for the privacy statement. When a visitor fills in the contact form, an item appears in that channel.

A channel that accepts submissions

You fill an ordinary channel from the admin. A channel that accepts submissions is also open to the form on your site. That switch sits per channel and also decides which fields a visitor may fill in. Fields outside that list cannot be filled by a form; they stay with the editors.

Nimbu can send two kinds of email on a submission: a notification to your own team and a confirmation to the sender. Each is switched on separately, with its own template and its own list of recipients.

These settings sit per channel. If you do not know whether they are on for your contact channel, ask the administrator who set the channel up.

The fields of your form

The structure of the channel decides what a visitor fills in and what you get back about it.

• Turn on required for what you genuinely need in order to reply, usually an email address. A submission missing a required value does not come in.
• Use email for an email address, not string. That way Nimbu checks the shape.
• Use select or multi_select for choices, so all answers are spelled the same way and you can filter on them.
• Use boolean for agreement with the privacy statement.

See Fields and structure for all types.

Following up on submissions

Submissions land in the same list as other items, and the default sort puts the newest on top. You search and filter them the same way, for example on an option field holding the subject of the question.

If you want to track which messages have been handled, add a select field with the statuses your team uses. That field does not belong to the fields the form fills in, so only your team sets it.

Spam

A channel that accepts submissions can have spam detection switched on. On the demo channel Contact it is on. What the system marks as spam does not simply join the ordinary submissions.

Reviewing spam is a separate permission. Whoever holds it can check a flagged message and decide whether it is genuine after all. Without that permission you miss those messages without noticing. Agree in your team who checks the flagged submissions.