After the beta
release 2 weeks ago Contour 2.0 is now feature complete and we
are releasing the RC.
What can I do with the RC?
Everything you can do with the Umbraco v4 version of Contour
should now also be possible on Umbraco v5 with the RC release of
Contour 2.0.
That includes:
- Managing forms from within the Umbraco backend
- Viewing, exporting and editing submitted records
- Outputting records on your frontend
- Attaching extra functionality to your forms (send email,
creating Umbraco content, …)
- … for full details check out the Contour product
page
There's even a great improvement, it's now possible to have
complete control over the form markup Contour will generate.
Custom markup for your Contour forms
The default view for the Contour form and field types can be
updated, making it possible to have custom form markup. You can do
this for al your forms or for a single form.
To do this for all your forms simply update the default
views:
~/App_Plugins/Packages/Contour/Views/MacroPartials/ContourForm.cshtml
(view for the form, including page name, fieldset, legend, field
container)
~/App_Plugins/Packages/Contour/Views/Partial/FieldType.*.cshtml
(view for a specific field type like textfield, datepicker,
...)
If you want to do this for a specific form you'll need to create
the following folder:
~/App_Plugins/Packages/Contour/Views/Forms/{FormId}/ (FormId needs
to be an existing form id, you can view the id of the form on the
settings tab of the form designer)
As an example if your form id is
85514c04-e188-43d0-9246-98b34069750c then you can overwrite the
form view by adding the ContourForm.cshtml file to the
directory
First copying the default one and then making your changes is the
best way to get started
~/App_Plugins/Packages/Contour/Views/Forms/85514c04-e188-43d0-9246-98b34069750c/ContourForm.cshtml
You can also overwrite views for 1 or more field types by adding
the views to the folder (again if you first copy the default one
and then make your changes...)
~/App_Plugins/Packages/Contour/Views/Forms/85514c04-e188-43d0-9246-98b34069750c/Fieldtype.Textfield.cshtml
A final option is to overwrite the view for a specific field on
a form (if you want to target a specific field but not all fields
of this type)
~/App_Plugins/Packages/Contour/Views/Forms/85514c04-e188-43d0-9246-98b34069750c/FieldName/view.cshtml
Getting started
In order to run the Contour beta you'll need to be running an
Umbraco 5.1 build (we are targeting 5.1, 5.0.x won't be supported),
you can get the latest build here: http://nightly.umbraco.org/Jupiter/51/
It just takes a couple of clicks to install Contour and once
it's active you can start adding forms to your pages. Simply
navigate to developer/packages/local packages , choose the Contour
nuget package and follow the installation wizard, once it's
installed you should have access to the Contour section. For a
detailed intro check the beta video.
Whats missing?
All features are in place and it should be on par with the
version you know from Umbraco v4. What we'll focus on now before
the release is updating the documentation (most things have stayed
the same but there are a couple of small changes due to the move
from Webforms to MVC that we'll outline in the docs).
Report bugs
Again it would be a big help if you could take the RC for a test
run and report any bugs you might find
here.
Download the Contour 2 RC build