I've spent the last few weeks working on a test site (hosted on my own personal account) to create forms in HTML (with a little PHP add-on in the background to handle emailing the info) for the newspaper where I work. Here's one example: http://forms.polestarstudios.com/adult_birthday.html
But I've also been lobbying for us to switch our site over to Drupal (or a Drupal-based avenue such as OpenPublish or ProsePoint) for weeks.
Today, I got the go-ahead (finally) to redesign our site in Drupal; I'll get the details on Monday.
I really don't want to have to go through the painstaking process of rebuilding these forms again -- especially because my training is in design and writing, not in coding of any kind; I've learned HTML and CSS in the last few years, but what I know about PHP and JavaScript would fit in a couple of sentences at best.
So it's taken me hours to build these forms. In fact, only five of the six on the test site are currently functional; I'm still working on the "weddings" form.
I really don't want to have to design these forms from scratch when I transfer them to the Drupal site. Is there any way I can port them over ... or at least reduce the amount of work I'll have to duplicate to bring them into Drupal?
Comments
Building forms in Drupal
Some useful resources to build forms in Drupal:
Form API handbook page
@API.ORG
Modifying forms from Lullabot
You could use some of HTML and css that is created, but you need to understand the Form API, theming the Form API to work with them in Drupal.
A good Form modules in Durpal is Webform
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Don't code
http://drupal.org/project/webform
will do the trick for all those forms, especially if you can handle a little css to get them exactly as you require.
Regards
Alan
Yikes!
Question: Have you looked at my forms to understand where I'm coming from? We're not talking about a typical form in this format:
Name: (text box)
Address: (text box)
City: (text box)
In the forms I've created, the form fields flow through paragraphs, so that it's more of a "fill in the blank to complete the sentence" kind of form. This was relatively easy (though very time-consuming) for me to create in HTML.
Shyamala's solutions are all very PHP heavy; as I noted above, my PHP skills are next to nil.
And I've tried Webform already ... and wanted to tear my hair out because it was so far off from what I wanted to do, and I couldn't see a way to adapt it easily to my needs. It may be capable of doing what I need ... but can it do it without me wanting to strangle the computer along the way?
Katrina
Site builder, writer, trainer, graphic designer
Themeing webforms
I think you might be able to get the inline fields accomplished with the appropriate themeing. Another maybe not-so-elegant method would be to create the form elements, then view the source of the page and take all the HTML and put it into another page node.