Your first form

A look at how to create your first form and hook it up to FormBackend

You bring your own form, meaning you have a HTML form and you want to capture the submissions when someone submits your form.

Let’s take the following contact form as an example:

<form action="[ACTION]" method="POST">
  <label for="name">Name</label>
  <input type="text" id="name" name="name" required>

  <label for="email">Email</label>
  <input type="email" id="email" name="email" required>

  <label for="message">Message</label>
  <textarea id="message" name="message"></textarea>

  <button type="submit">Submit form</button>
</form>

It’s a simple form with a name, email and message field. When someone submits this form, the URL in the action-attribute will be hit with the responses. This is where FormBackend comes in.

Create a FormBackend end-point

If you don’t have an account already, go create one at https://www.formbackend.com. Once your account has been created, we need to create a new form endpoint. Click the “Create new form” button on the forms page.

Give it a name that’ll help you identify the form and click “Create Form”. You should now be redirected to a set up page that tells you some details of your form, if that’s not the case click on the “Set Up” tab. The most important bit here is the unique FormBackend URL that points to your newly created form. The link will look something like: https://www.formbackend.com/f/abcdef - copy that URL.

Connect your HTML form

Take the URL you just copied and replace the value of the action-attribute on your form with that URL (in the example above, that is replace [ACTION] with the URL). Remember to save your HTML and things should now be working. You can verify that by filling in some example data and submitting your form. You’ll be taken to a “Thank you for your submission” page (this is customizable, read more here). If you go back to FormBackend you should see the response in FormBackend if you go to the submissions tab - if you don’t, it might be because it has been marked as spam - you can navigate to the spam submissions via the little dropdown that says “Inbox” towards the top of the page just under the “Submissions”-tab. You can move it to the inbox by clicking the checkbox to the left of the submission and click the “Move to Inbox” icon in the top right of the table.

Submission details

You can click on a submission to see all of the values submitted. You can also see a small event log on the right side of the submissions page which will show you more details. This is most important if you have set up sending emails, in which you can see if emails have been delivered and what emails were sent.