Software Review: MachForm PHP Form Builder - Page 2

Not only can you have the form data sent to multiple email addresses, but since this is database driven, everything is captured in the admin interface for you to login and reference. Options to export it to an Excel or CVS format are a nice touch.

You can either embed the form into your site, using an iframe, or you can link to it. Full control over CSS is given, so you can incorporate it into your site's look and feel without much work. To demonstrate the software, I created a mock Are You a Blogcritic? form. The only bit of "custom" work I did was to change the header to show our logo. This took little time to setup, thanks to MachForm.

My biggest gripe with the software is the limitation of characters in the fields to 255. This can be changed easily if you don't mind getting your feet wet, but again, most will not need to go beyond this limitation. The author will be changing this limit in the next version, however.

MachForm is worth the price — Bits du Jour plug, it is 49% off today, September 19, 2007 only — if you do not want to worry or deal with form validation, and just want a clean interface to work with. Coders will find the limitations pretty quickly, but then they can write their own form validation scripts.

I would like to see what the author could do for self-hosted polling software, especially if it was handled in the same manner as MachForm.

If you don't write in code all day, this form building software is easy to recommend. It is good to see more software using reCAPTCHA too, so kudos for including it.

Article Author: Ken Edwards

Ken Edwards is the Gaming Editor at Blogcritics, and calls Breaking Windows home. Ken works part time for Student Publications at BGSU as the Webmaster and System Administrator. He is also a freelance web developer.

Visit Ken Edwards's author page — Ken Edwards's Blog