Google Forms are a great, free way to collect information from anyone, stored directly into a Google Spreadsheet, and then have Google notify you each time a form is submitted (optionally). The downside is that you can only use one of their pre-packaged themes. You can't have your company logo and corporate "look".
Pooey to Google, I say.
Want to truly customized Google Forms? Fork this repository, customize the CSS, DOM and images, and deploy to Heroku. You can then host/customize any number of Google Forms.
For example, here is an original bare Google Form and here is a fully customized version, including form validation and thank you page.
It's fully a dynamic, thin layer on top of Google Forms. If you change your Google Form, your custom form application automatically changes.
Perhaps read this docco? Essentially if you can access Google Spreadsheets, you can create a Google Form (which automatically creates and updates a Google Spreadsheet based on the fields and form submissions).
It's really simple to play with and customize Google Forms:
gem install github
cd ~/Sites
gh clone mocra/custom-google-forms yourdomain-google-forms
cd yourdomain-google-forms
script/server
Go to http://localhost:3000/google_forms/new and add a Google Form:
The "Slug" is the URL path people will follow. That is, a slug "railsdev" maps to http://forms.mocra.com/railsdev.
The "Form Key" field takes either the Form URL or just the formkey parameter (e.g. dFo0LXQyYmlEV2dXcVJ6WjRweW9vRnc6MA) from when you view the live form.
Press "Create" and follow the slug url to view your Google Form through your own customized style.
Well, initially you'll see the Mocra style. Let's fix that.
First, fork the github repository so that you can push your style changes to your own repo.
gh fork
Now, edit public/stylesheets/style.css to your tastes.
Please don't reuse our style. Aside from having the :mocra logo at the top, it would be weird if your form looked like our forms. I guess you might as well have used the default Google Form themes?
Let's not get fancy, let's just deploy your fork to Heroku. It's free. It's simple. You'll be done in two minutes.
To get your copy of the application deployed to heroku:
gem install heroku
heroku create yourdomain-google-forms
git push heroku master
heroku rake db:migrate
Two optional environment variables:
heroku config:add GOOGLE_ANALYTICS='YOURCODE'
If specified, Google Analytics will be included on all pages (including the custom Google Forms page).
heroku config:add EXPECTED_DOMAIN='some.yourdomain.com'
If specified, 'yourdomain-google-forms.heroku.com/someform' automatically redirects to 'some.domain.com/someform'.
For example, for http://forms.mocra.com we used:
heroku config:add GOOGLE_ANALYTICS='UA-5370510-4'
heroku config:add EXPECTED_DOMAIN='forms.mocra.com'
Once deployed, go to the /google_forms/new URL and add your first form. Once it is validated and added, you can start using it using the links shown.
Copyright (c) 2010 Dr Nic Williams, Odin Dutton from Mocra
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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