forms

[Eric Soroos]

Theo, Bruce:
> this question of creating additional forms for a Manila website is currently
> interesting me as well. However I think it was Matt Neubeurg who wrote in a
> previous post that the Manila site building is a different set from the
> Frontier static site building. The mainresponder process described in the
> document is for the static frontier and therefore may not apply. 

Mainresponder builds on some of the static site tools, but is a live dynamic system. Manila is built on mainresponder and packages it in a way that makes it safe for shared hosts.

Because of the ways that manila is updated, it's generally better to build enhancements as plugins or hook in as callbacks rather than directly playing with a site's tables or modifying manila code. 

There are a few starting points that may help. All of these require some server access.

1), The Prefs Suite can be used on its own as an xml driven form tool. It defaults to saving user data in the user's membership table. Using it can be as simple as writing the xml description and calling the prefsSuite.browser macro. You will need server access for this. I tend to do this for things that aren't strictly user prefs, but rather preferences for plugins. This requires a bit of extra fiddling.  You can see a code example of this at: http://www.wiredfool.com/esotericSettingsPlugin/about

2) If you're writing a plugin, you will want to start with the plugin factory. It will write the skeleton for you.

3) If you just want to email existing prefs data, start looking through the callbacks. There's probably one in there that is called when preferences change. 

hth

eric