For any business professional, form submissions are a key component to the improvement of the company as well as its site. From being given the opportunity to create new clients, discuss technical issues with customers, and receive feedback on how to improve products, these forms can significantly impact the success of a business and provide an easy-to-use method of contact for consumers and businesses to interact within.
However, when managing content, clutter and improper data handling can lead to customers filling out forms and never receiving a response in return. Although utilizing your personal email or even team email may be a common practice, this can result in form submissions getting lost in the sea of emails you receive as a business and never being resolved by you or your team leading to customers that feel ignored or unimportant.
On top of this, by being forced to transfer data from your email to your application instead of bypassing the email altogether, you risk losing this data or being breached and supplying hackers with information about your clients in the process. In fact, when moving data, you can lose this data in the blink of an eye and, although there are plenty of data recovery services that can help you to retrieve this data, this proves even further that transferring these forms to your secure FileMaker application ensures your customer’s safety and your organization as a company. Therefore, instead of connecting these submissions to your email, you can connect them to your FileMaker application and, in doing so, be able to manage them accordingly and ensure that each and every submission is responded to in a timely fashion and is archived for later use, if necessary. On top of this, you can learn how to create an effective office brainstorming platform and take these form submissions into account when analyzing data for improvement.
In order to drop WordPress forms into your FileMaker dashboard, you must first decide what WordPress form you are intending on utilizing. For this tutorial, we will be using Gravity Forms as it is optimal for individuals looking for an easy-to-edit choice due to its WYSIWIG interface which allows users to visualize the actual content being created before it is even on the site itself rather than relying on custom code in order to achieve their desired form. We will also be using PHP code to command WordPress to send the form submissions to our FileMaker application rather than an email.
To do this, you want to tell WordPress to run the post to third party and to do it after the form has been submitted using this code on line 3:
add_action( ‘gform_after_submission’, ‘post_to_third_party’ , 10, 2 );
And this code on line 6:
function post_to_third_party( $entry, $form ) {
From there, in the function post_to_third_party you can define a site to send the data in line 8 using:
$post_url= ‘https://(insert your site’s name).com’ ;
Once this is complete and your site is inserted, you can then create an array for the body which includes anything you wish to incorporate including their name, email, phone, and comments. Once this is done, the form’s code will look something like this:
Once this is complete, your form will be ready to send to your site via an HTTP post and Gravity Forms will then send you a status letting you know that the form is completed. The form will wind up looking like the image below and will utilize the FileMaker PHP API to drop the data into your FileMaker dashboard and eliminate the need to enter the data into FileMaker once it is received.
In the end, the main benefit for this is being able to ensure that not only is your customer’s personal information being received and managed correctly but is also safe from data intrusion. With more and more attacks on email accounts in the last few years, utilizing a third party for form submissions which include content such as emails, phone numbers, names, and professions can ensure that, even if you are breached, your customer’s data remains secure. On top of this, with FileMaker 15 security enhancements in place, you can rest assured that your FileMaker application is far more safe than the weak security of your email and ensure that all of your team is up to date on form submissions and staying connected in an effective way in the process.