Form Editor

How to get the best out of your Coremedia CMS with free extensions

Tech // Jun 5, 2018

TAL Atomic Design Header Final 2x

Everyone who works with Content Management Systems (CMS) knows that the creation and implementation of a homepage form can cost time, money, and nerves. With the CoreMedia Suite Form Editor, we at Tallence AG have developed a quick and easy to use alternative. In just a few minutes you can embed forms into your website independently and according to individual requirements. Programming knowledge is not required. Thanks to our open source development approach, there are no costs for you as a company. This also applies to other CoreMedia solutions such as the Redirect Manager and the Contender, which supports automated deployments.

Registering for events, newsletters or orders – these days, almost without exception, all this is done using a form with predefined text fields. We know from many conversations with our customers that this is often difficult for editors from a wide range of industries, especially without the appropriate programming knowledge. This customer feedback was the starting signal for the Form Editor project as a supplement to the CoreMedia CMS Suite at Tallence. What was important to us was the open source approach, which not only offers our customers a free supplement to CoreMedia Content Management, but also guarantees continuous development through open access. For this we chose to publish on GitHub.

Using CoreMedia Studio, the most common form elements can be intuitively configured and displayed on your website. Individual elements and your own actions can be integrated directly into the modular building block.

Four principles were decisive for us in developing Form Editor:

  • SIMPLE: No or very little knowledge of the technical implementation is required. This means that editors can concentrate on the essentials – namely the provision of content.
  • INDEPENDENT: Website design and layout are independent of the editorial content. Content can thus be updated and adapted without the risk of unintentionally changing anything in the website design.
  • FLEXIBLE: There are often several people responsible for different parts of the website. Form Editor takes the user-specific definition of rights into account.
  • AUTHORISED: Form editor creates independence from external service providers. Website forms can be edited and updated at any time without having to wait for feedback or actions from service providers.

An example of the benefits of this CMS extension is provided by the use case of a customer from the public sector: with a large number of press conferences that need to be organised annually, the challenge arose to process the registration of journalists as quickly and smoothly as possible. Before Form Editor was used, the creation of the always slightly varying forms took a lot of time, but there were always on site queues and dissatisfied customers due to manual interventions (for example, copying ID cards). This has fundamentally changed with the use of Form Editor. Now it is possible for invited journalists to provide all information in advance simply, securely, and quickly using integrated forms. The Form Editor file upload function enables you to exchange data such as a scanned version of the ID card with the organiser. As a result, waiting times for our customers have been considerably reduced and satisfaction with the event has significantly increased.

The Tallence AG Form Editor is also well-equipped and provides practical tools with regard to privacy policy: for example, the privacy policy settings on websites can be easily updated; the checkbox function makes it possible to quickly link (renewed) privacy policy conditions on websites and then have them confirmed by users. The GDPR, which came into force on May 25, 2018, makes this use case even more relevant.

In addition to these basic functionalities, the customer experience and user-friendliness of the editor was of particular importance to our software developers. The development parameters were that the tool is intuitive and therefore easy to use, can be individually adapted and, thereby, used in a variety of ways.

Are you already working with CoreMedia, but lack easy-to-use extensions? Contact us for a free demo version and experience the benefits of our Form Editor. 

Click here to access the free Form Editor on GitHub: https://github.com/tallence/core-forms

Article by: Timo Lemke