FAQs

This is a copy of a post that has been in the Announcements forum for a long time - so some references are a little out of date. It will still help you with getting answers to your questions.

Thanks for registering on the ChronoEngine Forums. We'll be delighted to try and help you with your questions about ChronoForms, ChronoComments and ChronoConnectivity. All three of these products are developed by Max. Bob aka GreyHead helps out in the forums answering user questions, though he doesn't know anything much about ChronoComments or ChronoForums.

1. Questions about subscriptions, licenses and payments should be sent to Max privately either by PM or by using the Contact form from the menu bar at the top of the page.
2. There are many common answers in the FAQs, there is a good chance that you will find an answer to your question here.
3. The ChronoSearch at GreyHead.net is a custom Google search for this site, including the FAQs and forums, Greyhead.net and the Joomla! documents.
4. There are some Tutorials for ChronoForms available from the FAQs pages at the top of the page. These cover most basic uses of ChronoForms and are a good place to start out. From there you can also get information about The ChronoForms Book and about more Tutorial documents at Greyhead.net.
5. You can get free Support by asking questions in the forums. Most (but not all) questions get answered there fairly quickly. See 'K' below for more information. Please don't use the Contact Form or PMs for technical support questions unless you are asked by an admin or the issue is a sensitive one; it's more useful if answers are shared in the forums.
6. Questions about Emails are very common. Please first check the Tutorial and make sure all the steps are in place with a simple form and known good email addresses (do not test with Dynamic fields). Once you have basic emails working change the setup one step at a time checking as you go. By all means post in the Forums if you have a question or want to do something out of the ordinary - but most of the basic answers are in the Tutorials.
7. Please use the Tooltips and help texts on the Form Manager pages - these are not all perfect but they can be very helpful and give you hints of how fields need to be completed.
8. Please tell us which Version of which product you are using. With ChronoForms especially there are big differences between versions and we will assume that you are using the latest version unless you tell us otherwise. This is doubly important if you are still using Joomla 1.0!
9. Please do not ask us to Code your Form for you (unless you are prepared to pay). ChronoForms makes it very easy to create forms using the built-in Wizard or to copy and paste code from any HTML editor. We are happy to help out but we don't have the time to do basic work for free.
10. Please don't ask us to give you basic help with HTML, CSS, PHP or JavaScript. If you want to use the full power of ChronoForms and of Joomla then you ae going to need some basic coding skills. There are excellent tutorials on the net and they should really be your first point of reference. Michelle Steigerwalt's post on the Mootools blog Help I don't know JavaScript is an excellent place to start - not just for JavaScript.
11. Please give us useful detail about your problem. With a few rare exceptions ChronoForms and the other products work as promised. It doesn't help us to say 'it's broken' - please include Links or Images or Code snippets or a full Form Backup for ChronoForms. (You can email or PM these if you'd rather not post them in the forum.) When posting code, please be selective and post the broken bit if you possibly can. It is extremely difficul to debug 1000 lines of messy HTML so we probably won't. When posting links please make sure that they work and that they link to the problem page - it's very frustrating playing 'hunt the form'.
12. Please ask focused short questions if you can. These forums are busier than they used to be, we try to answer as many posts as we can but it's true that those that can be answered in two minutes will get answered more often and more quickly than those that need 30 minutes work. If we don't answer your question in a few hours please feel free to bump or nag - sometimes posts get overlooked.
13. Please search the forums for similar questions - there are many thousands of posts here now and it's very likely that someone else has asked something similar. Use the advanced search and try combinations of keywords. NB There's now ChronoSearch on Greyhead's site - a custom Google search you can get to from the Tutorials menu above.
    If you don't find anything then please ask the question anyhow. Note that if you re-ask a common question you will probably get a pretty short reply and may be asked so search again. If you ask a new and interesting question then you may get a long reply including code samples and links to other resources.
14. If you want to know 'will ChronoForms work with XXX' then the answer is probably 'Yes' - depending on what 'XXX' is and how friendly and well documented the interface is. We are fairly familiar with some Joomla extensions and commonly used external sites but there are thousands of others that we know little or nothing about. Please do as much research as you can to provide detailed information about your problem. Saying 'ChronoForms doesn't work with YYY, why not?' when YYY is a complex external site like SalesForce or an expensive Joomla extension is unlikely to get a quick answer.
15. The forums work mostly in English, if you aren't comfortable in English please feel free to post in your language and add a Google translation - they aren't perfect but they usually give us enough to go on.