I get a lot of questions about adding short forms to home pages.  Everyone has their own version of what they want to see, and I've been pretty good (bad?) about helping customize the source code for individual organizations, but really people, what makes you think I know what I'm doing?!

Here's how I trick you into thinking I'm a genius: First, I steal the source from the Developer Resources link at the bottom of the Salsa Interface.  I copy this into a plain text editor - I like Text Wrangler - then update the organization key, node, and redirect values based on what I need.  I edit out any fields that aren't needed.  If there are additional fields or functions that I need for the form, the easiest way to figure out what's needed is to create a basic signup page via the Website Features tab that does what you need.

For example, if I want a short form that will add members to a group and send an email trigger, I'll create a sign up page that does that same thing.  After the page is created, I can view the source of the page to pull out the parts that I need to add to my short form in my text document.

With little to no understanding of html, I know how baffling the markup can appear when you first view the source of a web page, but if you look closely, you can start to pick out familiar and useful segments.  Start by searching for the field names of the section that you need and from there you can narrow down what parts you need to cut and paste. 

A few tips:

• Check to make sure you have the opening and closing brackets for the form - You'll want to see <code> at the beginning and </code> at the end.
• Test it out!  If you don't want to paste anything into your home page template before knowing it works, try pasting the code into a content item through the Website Features tab and testing your form from there.
• Copy what you know works and save it.  Then open a new text file for your new changes.  Losing useful stuff is depressing.