2. Getting Started

A form is a page your visitors fill out and submit — a donation, an event reservation, an inquiry. Submissions arrive in your database, where they can be reviewed and turned into a family record and, where money changed hands, a transaction against a nominated fund.

The editor covers the questions the form asks, its appearance, where submissions are filed, what the visitor sees after submitting, and the email they receive. This article describes each area and how the editor is arranged. The articles that follow cover each in detail.

The Forms Page

Forms in the main menu lists every form in your organization with its name, status, date modified, and submission count. Columns sort, a search box filters by name, and chips filter by status.

Row actions are Edit, Preview in a new tab, Submissions, Duplicate, History and Delete. Delete is unavailable once a form has submissions. History holds every save of a form, with comparison and restore. Both are covered in The Forms List & History.

Starting a New Form

Create a new form offers four starting points, each a preassembled set of fields that can be changed afterwards.

Setup then collects a form name, a department, and a payment subcategory. For an event form it also collects the reservation items and their prices. These are required: the form cannot be saved until they are set.

The form name appears in the Forms list and is not shown to visitors.

How the Editor Is Arranged

Five tabs run across the top.

Editor holds the form itself: the fields, their order and labels, and the whole of its appearance. Settings covers three separate screens — how a submission is filed, what the visitor sees after submitting, and the code that embeds the form on a website. Email Confirmation is the email sent to whoever submits.

Security holds bot protection and declined-card protection, both active by default. Advanced holds four surfaces shown one at a time: API access, Custom CSS, Custom scripts, and the form's markup. A form can be built and published without opening it.

On a form set up as a payment link, the Editor tab is replaced by Form View.

The Three Views

Within the Editor tab, a three-way switch changes how the form is presented. It does not alter the form.

Design renders the form with everything selectable. Selecting an element shows its toolbar — Move up, Move down, Move somewhere else, Duplicate and Delete — and fills the properties panel beside it.

Structure shows the same form as a named outline, nested to show which elements sit inside which. Elements are selected and moved from the outline rather than from the rendered form.

Preview | AI Assistant is a split view: the design panel on one side, a live preview of the form on the other. The preview redraws as design options are changed, so styling and checking happen in the same place. The divider between the two can be dragged to give either side more room. The design panel also switches to the assistant, which takes a description of the design in plain language. Both are covered in The Look of Your Form.

The preview carries Phone, Tablet and Desktop width toggles, which redraw the form at that width. No browser resizing is required.

Saving

Changes reach a live form only on Save. A form already embedded on a website continues to serve its last saved version until then.

Save is disabled while anything required is missing, and lists what: a form name, a department, a payment subcategory, or a reservation list with no items in it.

Undo and Redo sit beside Save and cover structural changes — additions, deletions, moves and renames. Each names the change it will reverse. Configuration screens — giving amounts, the guest list, promo codes, the processing fee — count as one step per save, so undo reverses the whole screen rather than individual values.

Undo covers the current editing session. Changes saved previously are reversed through History, in The Forms List & History.

The Usual Order

Two constraints fix part of the sequence: the embed code exists only after the first save, and the confirmation email's merge field list reflects the fields currently on the form. Everything else can be done in any order.

Forms can be edited and saved at any point after publishing. Visitors receive the new version on save, and every prior save remains available through History.