4 Useful Tips for Fabrik in Joomla

: Written by Valentín García Valentín García; Published: 16 June 2015 16 June 2015

Fabrik is a Joomla extension that allows to create many types of applications. From simple forms to complex applications with extended database integration, the possibilities are huge.

Our members really like Fabrik, but at the same time they have been stuck regularly because the amount of features and settings are almost endless.

In this post, I'll share 4 helpful tips for when you're using Fabrik.

Tip #1. Pagination support

If you have a long form you can split it into multiple pages with pagination.

Go to Components > Fabrik > Groups
Your group
Pagination - multi page forms
Set "Page break" to Yes

For every new group assigned to the form a new page will be added as well. Make be sure at least one element is assigned to every group.

Below you can see the end result with pagination:

Tip #2. Validate fields

When building forms you will often need some fields to match certain criteria. In this example, we're going to make sure that an email field checks for valid email addresses.

Fabrik includes a validation plugin for this situation:

Go to Components > Fabrik > Elements
Choose the element
Validations > Add
Validation: isemail
Set an optional error message
Save

Test the validation on the front-end of your site by typing in an incorrect value. You should see your error message:

There are other available validation plugins available:

isnumer
isgreaterorlessthan
notempty
php
regex

That's not all. You can find a bigger list of validation options by searching the Fabrik area on Github.

Tip #3. Install plugins available on Github

If you need an extra plugin not available in the default Fabrik installation, go to the Github repository.

Download the Fabrik files by clicking the "Download ZIP" button on the right side of the screen.

Once the download is completed, unzip the file and look for the plugins folder.

In this example, we'll install a "Facebook like box" plugin.

Copy the /plugins/fabrik_element/fblikebox/ folder
Paste the folder inside your Joomla installation in /plugins/fabrik_element/

The end result will look like:

Go to Extensions > Extension manager > Discover
Click Discover button
Check the box for the new plugin
Click Install

Now, let’s enable it through the Plugin manager:

Tip #4. "Create Joomla user" plugin is missing

This final tip is related to tip #3.

We've had reports that that the "Create Joomla user" plugin is no longer part of the regular installation package. This plugin is really useful for allowing Fabrik forms to create Joomla accounts. However the plugin exists on Github.