Creating a form

This walkthrough takes a brand-new form from nothing to "ready to publish" in about three minutes.

Open the new-form dialog

From the sidebar, click Forms. The list view shows every form your org has built, in either grid or table view (toggle in the header). In the top right, click New form.

You'll see two fields:

• Name — what you'll call this internally. Visible to admins; also shown as the page title to the public when they open the form.
• Description (optional) — short blurb shown under the name. Useful for "We'll get back to you within 48 hours" or "Anonymous prayer requests welcome."

The slug — the URL-safe last part of the form's public link — is generated automatically from the name. You can edit it later in the builder. So Prayer Request becomes prayer-request and the public form lives at /form/prayer-request.

Click Create. GCM creates the form record, drops you into the builder, and seeds the form with one empty section called Section 1.

TIP

The default section name Section 1 is fine if your form only has one section — its label is hidden on the public form when there's only one. Rename it (or add more sections) only when you need them.

The builder layout

The form builder is a three-region page:

• Top toolbar — back, status badge, add-field menu, add-section, preview, publish toggle, save
• Left canvas — the form itself: name, description, slug, then sections containing draggable field cards
• Right panel — context-aware: shows form-level settings when nothing's selected, field-level settings when you click a field

The whole thing is keyboard-friendly. Ctrl+S (or Cmd+S on Mac) saves at any point. The Unsaved badge in the toolbar tells you when you have pending changes.

Add your first field

In the toolbar, click + Field. You'll get a dropdown listing all 17 field types (see the field types catalog for what each one does). Pick one — say, Text for a "Your name" field.

The new field appears in the section. It's auto-selected and the right panel switches to field settings. From here you can:

• Set the Label (what the visitor sees above the field)
• Set the Placeholder (greyed-out text inside the field, before they type)
• Set the Help text (small print under the field)
• Toggle Required
• Set the Width — full, half, or third (only takes effect on desktop; mobile is always full-width)
• For typed fields (text, number, file), open the Validation section to add min/max length, min/max value, allowed file types, or a max file size

Each field type exposes only the settings that make sense for it — a Heading field has no required toggle, a Number field has no max-length but does have a step, a File-upload field has its own extension and size settings.

Add more fields, drag to reorder

Repeat the add-field flow for every question on your form. Drag a field card by its handle to:

• Reorder within the current section
• Move it into a different section

Drag a section's handle to reorder whole sections. If you drag a field onto an empty section, it'll snap into the section's empty slot. If you drag it onto another section while there's already content, it inserts at the position you drop.

Sections — when to use them

A section is a labelled group of fields. Use sections when:

• You have a long form (10+ fields) and want to break it up visually
• You're collecting different types of info (e.g. "Your details" + "Your prayer request" + "How can we follow up?")
• You're going to use the same form for different kinds of submissions and want each chunk to be optional-feeling

Click + Section in the toolbar to add one. Click the section title to rename it. Click the trash icon to delete it — if a section contains fields, the fields move to the section above it (or the first remaining section) rather than being deleted with it.

Preview before you publish

Click Preview in the toolbar to see the form exactly as the public will see it. The preview is a modal — no actual submission happens, but every field is interactive, validation runs, and you can see whether your widths and layout look right.

The preview also picks up your church's brand color, so what you see is what your visitors will see (give or take any custom CSS on a website-builder page).

Save your draft

Click Save (or hit Ctrl/Cmd+S). If you haven't given the form a name yet, you'll get an error. If you have a slug that contains illegal characters (anything other than lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens), you'll get a different error pointing you at the slug field.

Once it saves, the Unsaved badge clears and the form is safely stored. You can leave the builder, come back tomorrow, and pick up exactly where you left off.

Publish

When you're ready to share the form with the public, click Publish in the toolbar. The status badge flips from draft to published and a green banner appears at the top of the canvas showing the shareable URL. That URL is now live — anyone who hits it will see the form.

To take it back down later, click Unpublish. The URL returns a 404 again, but everything else — fields, settings, past submissions — sticks around.

WARNING

Changing the slug after publishing breaks any links you've already shared. Pick a slug carefully, and once it's printed on a bulletin or posted on social media, leave it alone.