Forms on your website

A form is a set of questions you build once. Put one on a page of your website and anyone who visits can fill it in — no Psalmly account needed. A volunteer sign-up, a facility request, a preschool enquiry, a "tell us about yourself" card for newcomers.

Forms live under Forms in the admin sidebar. Getting one in front of people takes three steps, and the third is the one people miss:

1. Build the questions.
2. Start taking answers.
3. Add it to a page — until a page holds your form, nobody can reach it.

Two ways to use a form

Your Forms list is one library, and every form in it can be used two ways:

• On a page of your website — anyone who visits can fill it in, signed in or not. That's what this article covers.
• Attached to an event — members complete it to register, and it can gate a spot. See Event sign-ups, forms, and capacity.

The same form can do both at once — a waiver attached to two events and open on your website — and its row shows both lives. The answers count on the row adds them together.

Building the questions

Click New registration form to start, or Edit form from a form's row menu. Give it a name (visitors see it as the heading) and an optional description, then add questions. Each one has a label, a type, and a Required / Optional toggle.

There are nine question types:

• Short text and Long text — a line, or a paragraph box.
• Email, Phone, Number, Date — checked as they're typed, so you get usable answers.
• Multiple choice — pick one from your list of options.
• Checkboxes — pick any number from your list.
• Yes / No.

Drag questions to reorder them, or move them with the buttons on each row. Editing a form changes it everywhere it's used at once, including on any page that already holds it — so a question you reword mid-season is reworded on the website straight away, and answers already sent stay attached to the question they answered.

Opening a form for answers

From a form's row menu, choose Start taking answers. That opens its settings — the same panel Edit settings reopens later:

• Is it taking answers? — Open means anyone who visits a page with the form can fill it in and send it. Closed still shows on any page that has it, but says it's closed and accepts nothing new.
• Open and close it on a schedule (optional) — a Starts taking answers moment, a Stops taking answers moment, or both. Leave them empty for "right away" and "no end date".
• Stop after this many answers (optional) — good for a bus with 40 seats. Once it's reached, the form closes itself.
• Ask for a name and email. On, and a name and email box sits above your own questions, so you know who answered. Off, and nobody is asked who they are — use that for an anonymous poll.
• What people see after they send it (optional) — shown on the page in place of the form. Leave it empty and Psalmly says thank you for you. Nobody is emailed a copy of what they sent.
• Keep answers for — see below.

A form has one round of collecting at a time. To start a clean slate for next year while keeping last year's answers, Duplicate the form instead.

Putting the form on a page

This is the step that puts a form on your website. Opening it for answers decides whether it collects; adding it to a page decides whether anyone can find it.

Go to Pages, open or create a page, add a Form block, and pick your form. Save the page. If the page is still a Draft, publish it — a form on an unpublished page is reachable by nobody.

You can give the block a different heading if the form's own name doesn't suit the page, and you can put the same form on several pages — they all collect into one set of answers.

Psalmly tells you when something is off. A form that's taking answers but sits on no published page says so on its row — "It's taking answers, but it isn't on a page yet — nobody can reach it" — with a link straight to your pages. Each row also states where its form is: Not on a page yet, On Volunteer, or On 3 pages.

Who can fill it in

Anyone who can open the page. Your website is public, so a form on a published page is open to visitors, members and strangers alike, whether or not they have a Psalmly account.

Psalmly doesn't put a sign-in wall or a password on a form. If a form isn't for everyone, the thing you control is which page it sits on — and you can take it off the website at any time by removing the block from that page, or stop it collecting with Stop taking answers.

Every form is protected against spam bots before anything is sent, so you aren't reading through junk.

Reading the answers

Open a form's answers from its row — click the count, or choose See the answers from its menu. New ones arrive with an unread pill on the row and on the Forms link in your sidebar.

There are two tabs. Summary opens first and shows the shape of the answers, aggregated across every one: a bar per option on your choice questions, and sample answers on the text ones. Individual is the table — one row per answer, one column per question. Click a row to read that person's whole response; it's marked read as you go.

On the Individual tab you can narrow what you're looking at:

• Search by name or email.
• Show Unread only.
• Filter by an answer to a choice question — everyone who picked Saturday morning, say.
• Filter by date — Last 7 days, Last 30 days, or a range of your own.
• Sort Newest first or Oldest first.

Answers can hold a child's name, a phone number or an allergy, so this screen is private by design: there's no share link and no public view of it.

Exporting the answers

Two buttons sit at the top of the answers screen:

• Download CSV — a spreadsheet with a column per question. Good for sorting, printing a checklist, or handing to whoever is running the thing.
• PDF — a tidy, printable table of the same answers.

From the Individual tab, both export exactly what your filters are showing — just this month, say, or just the people who chose one option — and you can select rows with their checkboxes to export only those. From Summary, both export every answer the form has.

Export before you shorten how long answers are kept, and before you delete them — "keep them" means "take them with you."

How long answers are kept

Every form has a Keep answers for setting: 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years or 3 years. There's no "keep forever" — a form can hold personal details about people who never signed up for anything, so Psalmly makes you choose a window and then honours it.

A nightly clean-up deletes answers older than the window. The answers screen says when that next bites: "Answers to this form are kept for 365 days, then deleted automatically. The oldest here goes on September 19, 2027."

⚠️ Shortening the window deletes answers that are already older than the new one, in that night's clean-up. Psalmly warns you at the moment you shorten it. Export anything you need first.

Closing, reopening, and starting fresh

• Stop taking answers closes the form. It stays on every page that holds it and says it's closed — visitors see it was a real thing and that they've missed it, rather than finding a gap where it used to be. Your answers are untouched.
• Take answers again reopens it.
• A form also closes itself when it reaches the number of answers you set, or when its closing time passes.
• To take it off the website entirely, remove the Form block from the page. That changes nothing about the answers you've already collected.

Deleting answers, and deleting the form

These are two different things, and both are permanent.

Delete all answers lives at the bottom of the answers screen, where you can see what you're deleting. It asks you to confirm and counts them first. The form, its questions and its settings all stay, and it keeps taking new answers.

Delete in a form's row menu destroys the form itself — its questions, its settings and every answer ever sent to it, including from events. The confirmation names everything it will take. If you only want it out of the way, Archive keeps it and its answers, and you can restore it later.

⚠️ Archiving a form takes it off your website too. A page holding an archived form shows nothing where it was, so Psalmly asks first when a form is live on a published page.