A few weeks ago we pushed out an update to branchCMS that adds a few new field types for Forms & Surveys. 

• Rating
• Field Group
• Section Heading
• HTML
• Content

Granted, the first one is the only one that's actually a form field, but the others make it easier to create different form layouts without having to customize the form templates all the time. 

Here is a brief overview of each new field type.

Rating

The rating field is essentially a special type of radio button field. It makes it easy to setup a numeric rating field. You could use it for gathering a numeric rating on a service or with a little bit of Javascript or plain CSS you could use it to do a star rating.

Field Group

Sometimes a form design calls for grouping some fields together under a common heading. In the past, the best way to do that was to heavily customize the form template and explicitly put each field in the form template. Now, with the Field Group it's possible to organize fields in a group so that you can more easily style the fields while still simply looping through the fields in the template.

Here is an example of a Field Group in action.

Section Heading

Suppose that your form design requires breaking up the form layout with headings and a bit of text below the heading. Now it's easy to add that to the form with the Section Heading field. By default the Section Heading will output as an <h3> tag followed by a <p> tag for the description. Here is an example HTML output for the {#field.tag} value.

<h3 id="section-heading">Section Heading</h3><p>Section Description</p>

HTML

The HTML field does just what it sounds like, it lets you output some custom HTML code in the form.

Content

The Content field lets you include some custom content entered into a rich text editor in your form.

Updated Default Form Template

We have updated the default form template to make use of the new field types. Keep in mind, though, that you can always customize the form templates to meet your needs. They are simply there as a convenience.