Build and edit a form

How to create a new form, configure its mail template, and save it ready to embed on a page

The form builder is where you create a new form or edit an existing one. One screen covers the title, the fields visitors fill in, the email your admins receive on each submission, the success message, and the optional redirect URL. After saving, you get a shortcode like Err: Form not found! that you paste onto any page to display the form to visitors.

What is this for?

The form builder is your form authoring tool. You reach for it when you need a new way to collect information from visitors — a Contact form, a lead-capture form on a landing page, a newsletter signup, or a custom survey. Saving the form creates a shortcode that you paste into any page or post.

Every form has four big decisions:

• Which fields do you want on the form? — Name, Email, Phone, Message, any custom field.
• Where should the email notification go? — the inbox that receives a copy of every submission, plus the subject line and body template.
• What happens after a visitor submits? — show a thank-you message, redirect to a confirmation page, or both.
• Should it be published or kept as a draft? — drafts are saved but don't render on public pages.

Good use cases

Example 1: Building a classic Contact form. You want a simple Contact form with Name, Email, Message, and a working email to your admin inbox. Open Forms → Add New. In the My Form card, set the Title to "QA Simple Contact". In the Field Palette, drag Text, Email, and Textarea onto the canvas, naming them name, email, and message. In Mail Settings, tick Send email on submission, set Subject to New Contact from [field name="name"], set To to your admin inbox, and set the Body to include [all_fields] so you get every submitted value in a table. In the right sidebar, set Status to Publish, click Create a Form. You end up on the edit page with a shortcode Err: Form not found! ready to paste. Drop it onto a Contact page, submit a test entry, and the email that lands in your inbox looks like this:

Subject: New Contact from Ada Lovelace
From: Your Website <no-reply@your-site.example>
To: jc@sgen.com
Name: Ada Lovelace
Email: ada@example.com
Message: Hi — I'd like to ask about your pricing for a team of 12.
----- All Fields -----
| Field | Value |
| name | Ada Lovelace |
| email | ada@example.com |
| message | Hi — I'd like to ask about your pricing... |
----------------------

Example 2: Lead-capture form with extra fields. You're running a campaign landing page. Build a form with Full Name (Text), Business Email (Email), Company (Text), Phone (Tel), and a "How did you hear about us?" (Text) field. Put the email notification on your sales inbox. In Settings, set a Redirect URL to /thank-you so leads land on a confirmation page. Publish. Paste the shortcode into the landing page.

Example 3: Editing an existing form's notification recipient. The "Contact" form was going to jc@sgen.com and you need to change it to support@yourcompany.com. Open Forms → All Forms, click the Contact row. In Mail Settings, change the To field, click Update a Form. Submissions after this change send to the new inbox; submissions already received stay in the Submissions list unchanged.

Example 4: Keeping a form in Draft while you iterate. You're still tweaking the copy on a new survey. Set Status to Draft. Save. The form is stored but its shortcode renders nothing on public pages, so you can paste it onto a preview page and not worry about visitors hitting a half-baked form. Flip to Publish when ready.

Zooming into the Mail Settings card for Example 3, here is the exact shape you are editing — the fields and hints you see when you open an existing form and adjust its notification recipient:

What NOT to use this for

• Do not use the form builder to design popups or modals. Popup logic lives in a separate Popups area; this builder creates the form, not the container.
• Do not use bare shortcodes in the Mail Settings body. Writing [name] on its own does not work — SGEN's form renderer only recognizes [field name="name"], [form_title], and [all_fields] in mail bodies. If you type [name], the email arrives with the literal string [name] in it. Use [field name="name"] for a single field or [all_fields] for the whole submission as a table.
• Do not rely on status Draft as a security guardrail. Drafts simply don't render on public pages; they are not private in any deeper sense. Anyone with admin access can still see and edit them.
• Do not change Template mid-editing with unsaved changes. Switching Template rebuilds the editor — in-progress field edits may be lost.

How this connects to other features

• Pages / Posts — after saving, copy the Err: Form not found! shortcode and paste it onto the page or post where you want visitors to see the form. Unpublished forms render nothing, even when the shortcode is in place.
• Forms → Submissions — every form submission lands in the Submissions list. The right sidebar on the builder has a View Entries button that takes you straight to this form's submissions.
• Notifications / Email — the Mail Settings card is where you decide who gets notified and what the email looks like. Mail shortcodes supported: {{site_title}}, {{site_url}}, jerome@sgen.com, {{page_title}}, [form_title], [all_fields], and [field name="fieldname"].
• Google reCAPTCHA — the Settings card has a reCAPTCHA toggle. Turning it on only takes effect after your reCAPTCHA site and secret keys are configured at the site level.

Before you start

• You are signed in to SGEN as an Administrator.
• You know the admin inbox that should receive submissions (an email address you or your team watches).
• Optional: the URL of the confirmation page you want visitors redirected to after submit.

Where to go

1. Open the left navigation.
2. Click Forms → All Forms, then + Add New in the top-right (or open /sg-admin/forms/add_new directly).
3. To edit an existing form, click its title in the Forms list.

Steps — Build a new form

1. Name the form

The My Form card at the top has a Title field. Set it to something you will recognize on the Forms list — "Contact", "Beta Signup", "Product Demo Request".

2. Drag fields onto the canvas

On the Default template, a Field Palette sits next to the form canvas with built-in field types: Text, Textarea, Email, Tel, Number, Password, Select, and others. Drag the field you want onto the canvas.

For each field on the canvas:

• Give it an internal name (the slug you use in the mail template — name, email, message, company). The name must be lowercase and contain no spaces.
• Optionally give it a visible label (what the visitor sees above the input).
• Set whether the field is required.

Reorder fields by dragging the handle on the left of each row; remove a field with its delete icon; duplicate with the duplicate icon.

3. Configure Mail Settings

In the Mail Settings card:

• Tick Send email on submission if you want an email every time a visitor submits.
• Subject — the subject line of the email. Supports shortcodes: use [field name="name"] to include the submitter's name, {{site_title}} for your site name.
• To — the inbox that receives the notification. A single email address; multiple addresses are not tested.
• Body — the email message. For the simplest possible setup, put [all_fields] on a line by itself — this renders a table of every submitted field automatically. For more control, use one [field name="..."] per value and arrange them however you like.

4. Configure Success / Redirect

In the Settings card:

• Success Message — shown to the visitor in place of the form after a successful submit. Plain text or basic HTML.
• Redirect URL — optional. If set, the visitor is sent to this URL after submit instead of seeing the Success Message. Use a path like /thank-you for an on-site confirmation page.

5. Set Status and save

In the right sidebar:

• Status — Publish (live on public pages) or Draft (saved but not live).
• Click Create a Form (on a new form) or Update a Form (on edit). The page reloads on the edit screen for the new form.

After save, the top of the edit screen shows the shortcode you now paste onto pages: Err: Form not found!.

Steps — Edit an existing form

Open Forms → All Forms, click the title of the form you want. The builder loads with every field, setting, and mail detail as they were last saved. Change any of them, click Update a Form on the right sidebar.

The edit screen has extras the new-form screen does not:

• A View Entries button in the sidebar — jumps to Submissions filtered to this form.
• A Move to Trash link in the sidebar — soft-deletes the form.
• A small Meta list showing who created the form and when it was last modified.

What success looks like

• Saving a new form lands you on the edit screen with a shortcode visible at the top.
• Saving an edited form reloads the edit screen with your changes in place.
• Status Publish makes the form render on any page that contains its Err: Form not found! shortcode; Status Draft makes the same pages render nothing where the form would have been.
• A visitor submitting a Published form sees the Success Message (or is redirected to your Redirect URL), and your admin inbox receives an email with the submitted values.

Visitors arriving at the page with your shortcode see the form rendered right in place — no styling, no frame, just the fields you arranged in the builder:

After the visitor clicks Submit, the form is replaced by your Success Message (for example, "Thanks! We'll be in touch shortly.") — or, if you set a Redirect URL, the visitor jumps to that page instead.

What to do if it does not work

• The email I received shows [name] as literal text instead of the submitted value. The Mail body is using bare [name], which SGEN does not resolve. Edit the Body to use [field name="name"] or add [all_fields] for a full table of submitted values.
• No email arrives at all after a submit. Check that Send email on submission is ticked in Mail Settings, and that To contains a real, watched inbox. Look in the inbox's spam folder.
• Pasting Err: Form not found! onto a page shows the literal text instead of a form. The shortcode has to be pasted into a content block that renders shortcodes (a Text / Paragraph block, not a Code or raw-HTML block that escapes brackets).
• The form renders nothing at all on the page. The form's Status is probably Draft. Open the form, flip Status to Publish, save.
• I get a validation error when saving a new form. Title must be at least 2 characters. Mail Subject, Mail To, and Mail From are required (if Mail is enabled). Fill any missing fields and try again.

Next step