Customising HTML

Hello Steven, I too am a developer who has struggled with NetCommunity's  poorly written platform. I have found a few alternative methods of extending NetCommunity, but nothing terrific.


NetCommunity relies on ASP postbacks to process front-end data. You cannot pass data from one part of a page to another via JS, I have tried many methods of doing this. The only method that worked partially was creating localstorage values, but even that was unreliable. NetCommunity's API is poorly documented and the only publically exposed method is account creation as far as I know.


If you're familiar with PHP or cURL, I have created some scripts that play well with the postbacks and also properlly pass hidden ASP form values with each request. So far I've been able to create a user, login a user / pull their info, submit forms, etc... If you'd like to try out these scripts I'm happy to share, though they are still in development.


As a side note, you can inject JS / jQuery into unformatted parts, though due to the postback restrictions, you will not get very far.

Feel free to shoot me an email: mail@chrismcgrane.com


-Chris


 

Hello Steven,


The example you've provided shows a self-hosted NetCommunity site where they have modified the actual platform to use divs over tables. This is not something you will be able to accomplish easily with JS as a hosted client.


Chris

If you're self hosted than you can find where the tables are being generated pretty easily in the source.

Steven, we've been using NC since 2011 and it's been a rough go. Last year we did a redesign and since most of the NC forms are table-based, what I ended up doing was completely hiding them via CSS and then creating my own forms in an unformatted text part. I then used jQuery to connect my form fields with the hidden NC forms. So when someone fills out my custom 'FirstName' field, it is automatically filling out the NC form 'FirstName' field. And when the Submit button is clicked, it actually triggers the click event on the NC form.


It takes extra time and effort, but doing it this way has allowed me to set up the website exactly how I want it (mostly).

Lance, which forms on the MAF site are you referencing? I'm on the donation form and the inputs are still held within tables, breaking responsiveness. 




Other than that, the site looks nice.

 

Hi Chris,


The Donate form parts are all custom. The Donation Checkout form is not, but I've used jQuery to manipulate the tables in order to put the labels above the form fields. I've thought about hiding the checkout form and building my own, but BBNC seems to pull other information into this page from the previous Donate pages, and since I have many donation forms there were enough unknowns that I didn't want to risk it.


Lance