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Hello!
I'll readily admit that I'm a complete newbie to Joomla and creating websites in general, so please be patient! Hopefully, I'm posting this in the right section.

I installed Joomla 1.5 and have figured out quite a lot of things so far (thanks in part to the helpful people who post to these forums!), but I am trying to figure out how exactly to make customized output for a form... basically, what I want to do is this:

User visits a form page from the main menu, and is invited to select checkboxes and write in text boxes. Example:
What kind of animals do you like?
[] Dogs
[] Cats
[] Horses
[] ______user can type here___
[] ______user can type here___

The user then clicks Submit, and the resulting page has the same look as the rest of my site (so it doesn't just look like a white background with black text - it follows my template, in other words), and the output should look like:

Bring this card into our store for discounts on items related to:

• Dogs
• Cats
• XXXX

The output might include a picture, the website name, or whatever, but it would all fit in a 3x5" box (to be printed to an index card size). I'd like it to use the built-in PDF and printer icons available in Joomla 1.5.

This is just an example, but I really don't know where to start with creating such a thing - is there functionality included in Joomla for this? Is there an extension (preferably free!) that I should be using? What language(s) would offer such customized output?

Hopefully someone can point me to a tutorial or online tool to generate such a thing... like I said, I'm very new to all of this, and I really appreciate your help/guidance. Thank you in advance!!

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

This sounds very specific although it's "just a form".
You may try one of the many "form builders" available and see if they run well with 1.5

It definitely smells like a Component to render the form, store the results (session or database), and to print the PDF.
The tools to do this yourself are all available in the J! 1.5 Framework, provided you can code PHP. The API is available at http://api.joomla.org.

Have fun,
CirTap

Hi, and thank you!

As I mentioned, I'm a complete newbie... I don't even have any real PHP knowledge, but after reading most of the internet in the last few days (riiiiiiight), I *think* the solution to this is the Jumi extension. I tried some form builder extensions but had no luck. I read what Jumi does, haven't had a chance to try it yet, but I think it sounds like what I need. I can make the form input, then output to a Jumi module with my custom HTML, just using PHP echo for the output where needed.

So I hope it's as simple as I'm thinking, will try this weekend. Again, thanks for your input! API stuff sounds scary to me right now though... hehehe.