On January 25, Sitecore released a new SaaS solution: XM Cloud Forms, a seamless and dedicated interface to create and design engaging form experiences by both business users and developers.
In this blog-post I’m going to have a quick look and explore its key features and will show you some designs on its capabilities.
Key Features
XM Cloud forms offers the following key features:
- Easy Form creation – Create, update, delete and review forms in an easily fashion
- Drag & Drop – Forms can easily be dragged & dropped to a page in Pages, Components and in the Experience Editor
- Webhooks – Send form submissions/data using webhooks, which can go to third-party systems or which can trigger workflows using Sitecore Connect
- XM Cloud Analytics -Forms performance metrics, such as form views, submissions and many more, will be available in the XM Cloud Analytics dashboard
- Template Library – Out of the box you’ll get a list of pre-setup and designed templates as a starting point for setting up your own forms
JSS update
Like I blogged about earlier on at Sitecore releases huge headless JSS 21.6 update for XM Cloud, in order to use Sitecore XM Cloud Forms, existing implementations of XM Cloud have to upgrade their solution to the new JavaScript SDK (JSS) version 21.6.
Let’s see it in action!
On de Sitecore XM Cloud launchpad overview we now have a new Forms application:
Clicking on the above Forms application opens up the Forms Dashboard (Forms application), where we can create a new form:
Click on ‘Create New’ to create a new form, fill in a name of the form and click on ‘Save’.
Your new form is created and you’ll see an empty form. You now have 2 options, create a form from scratch by choosing a layout or you can go to the upper left corner and choose ‘Template Library’ to see the XM Cloud Forms templates that come out of the box. Let’s have a look at those:
Sitecore XM Cloud Forms comes out of the box with 5 example templates that will give you a head start in creating your own forms quickly and easily
You can preview one of the templates or use one of the templates, once used it’ll be used on your current form. Let’s use the ‘Get Free Email Updates’ now. As you can see above you can easily favorite a particular form template, which will then be added to the ‘Favorites’ template section.
Now that you have a form based upon a template, you can then start extending and customizing it. Next to the ‘Layouts’ tab, you have the ‘Items’ tab and there you can find the fields that are available:
Fields
There are a lot of out-of-the-box input fields that can be used in your created form:
Action Button, Email, Phone, Short Text, Long Text, Select, Multi Select, Date, Number, Radio, Checkbox, Checkbox Group, Terms & Conditions, reCAPTCHA
Basic
The basic section shows us some non-input controls such as:
Image, Text, Spacer, Social Media
Custom
Sitecore XM Cloud Forms offers a Custom section where you can store your own custom items, that might be custom building blocks that consist out of one or more fields.
Especially the Image control/component has some interesting integrations. You can drag the Image component to the form, and then when selecting the image you’ll see a huge amount of possible sources where the image could come from, such as Local Files, Unsplash, Giphy, Facebook, Google Drive, Instagram and many more.
And that’s how easy it is to get started with Sitecore XM Cloud Forms. Have a look and play with it yourself.
Future XM Cloud Forms features
The XM Cloud Forms SaaS offering is actively worked upon at Sitecore and the following things are on the roadmap:
- Conditional logic
- Enhancements in the end to end user journey
- And much much more
XM Cloud Forms documentation
Need help with Sitecore XM Cloud Forms? There’s some great user documentation available. Here are some how-to articles to get you started.
And that’s it…(for now). In a future post I’m going to explore this ‘Email sign-up form’ some more and focus on seeing it in action in terms of a webhook integration.
Happy Sitecore-ing!
–Robbert
