PloneFormGen

 If you are interested in helping develop the product, contact Steve
McMahon <steve@dcn.org>.

 Product home is http://plone.org/products/ploneformgen

Overview

 This product provides a generic Plone form generator using fields,
 widgets and validators from Archetypes.

 To use it, create a form folder, then add form fields as contents.
 Individual fields can display and validate themselves for testing
 purposes. The form folder creates a form from all the contained field
 content objects.

 Final disposition of form input is handled via plug in action products.
 Action adapters included with this release include a mailer and a save
 data adapter that saves input in tab-separated format for later
 download.

 To make it easy to get started, newly created form folders are
 pre-populated to act as a simple e-mail response form.

Rationale For This Product

  * Plone needs a general-purpose form generator that may be used for
  mail forms, RDBMS database interactions and other functions that don't
  require the Archetypes' persistence machinery;

  * Designing a form using such a form generator should not require a)
  work on the file system, b) creation of new content types, c) use of
  the ZMI (except for scripting field population or custom validation).
  [PloneFormMailer is an outstanding, useful product, that suffers only
  for its reliance on the ZMI/Formulator for design.]

  * Archetypes, in conjunction with the CMF Form Controller, has a form
  generator built-in. Ideally, it should be possible to repurpose the
  Archetypes widgets and validators (which were evidently intended to be
  generally useful) for a more general-purpose form generator.

FAQs, How-To's and Such

 http://plone.org/products/ploneformgen/documentation

Dependencies

 Requires TALESField and TemplateFields from Jens W. Klein's ScriptableFields 
 bundle <http://plone.org/products/scriptablefields/>.

 Encryption of e-mail requires the Gnu Privacy Guard, GnuPG, also known
 as gpg. See README_GPG.txt for details.

Installation

 Typical for a Zope/Plone product:

  * Install dependencies.
 
  * Unpack the product package into the Products folder of the
  Zope/Plone instance. Check your ownership and permissions.

  * If you're using Plone 2.5.1, you may wish to rename
  "configure.zcml.plone25" to "configure.zcml". This will take advantage
  of some Five features to improve i18n.

  * Restart Zope.

  * Go to the Site Setup page in the Plone interface and click on the
  Add/Remove Products link. Choose PloneFormGen (check its checkbox) and
  click the Install button

Security

 As shipped, managers and owners may use TALES expressions to override
 defaults and validators. This is a potential security risk as it
 basically gives the same powers as scripting or skin editing. You may
 wish to change roles granted the "PloneFormGen: Edit TALES Fields"
 permission to restrict the ability to edit TALES expression in form
 fields.

Known Problems

 Changing the short name of a form field object via the folder-contents
 rename button or via the rename action will not change the id/name of
 the field when it appears in the form. The workaround is to use the
 field object's edit view when short-name editing is allowed.

Credits

 Archetypes has been ruthlessly mined for concepts and functionality.
 The base view and edit macro templates are very slightly modified
 versions of Archetype's base_edit and edit_macros.

 Form and field icons are scavenged from Martijn Faassen's Formulator,
 and were edited only to add transparency to make them look a bit better
 on the add items menu.

 The mail adapter is basically a tailored version of PloneFormMailer,
 minus the Formulator adapter machinery. Thanks to PloneFormMailer's
 authors, Jens Klein and Reinout van Rees.

 Pierre-Yves Landure provided tremendous help with the i18n machinery.
 Sebastien Douche and Pierre-Yves Landure provided the French translation.

 Martin Aspeli's RichDocument has provided an invaluable reference,
 particularly in how to handle installation and testing issues.

 Martin Aspeli, Wichert Akkerman, Eric Steele, Jens Klein and Reinout
 van Rees all provided valuable early feedback.

 See the CHANGES.txt file for the very long list of people who helped
 with particular features or bugs.

License

 Distributed under the GPL.

 See LICENSE.txt and LICENSE.GPL for details.


