The New Dubsado Form Builder - A Comprehensive Guide

Great news!

Dubsado launched a new form builder that they’ve been working on for quite some time.

What’s the difference?

The biggest difference vs. the last version is the ability to use full width containers. It allows for for content and images to span the full width of your screen. It removes the whitespace around your form which looks great. And adds the ability to add colors and images to the background in sections of your form.

In this blog post which includes a video tutorial, I’ll take you through the new form builder and show you how to use it.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. This comes at no additional cost to you.

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Compare these pages side by side. One is a website template I made in Squarespace and the other is a Dubsado form template.

Can you tell which one is which? Note - I cropped the very top and bottom of each page to remove the top menu and footer.

Maybe you can tell, but even so - it’s not as obvious as it would have been if I had used the old Dubsado form builder. 

And THAT is what makes the new form builder amazing.

In case you were wondering, the left one is Dubsado and the right one is Squarespace.

Features of the new Dubsado form builder

Legacy mode

The legacy mode is there to protect coded forms from getting messed up with the new form builder.

If your form does not have CSS code, you can turn this off. The cool thing is that legacy mode is set per each form, so you can turn it off for a single form and leave it on for others. 

To turn the legacy mode off, go to the form menu (left hand side menu). Go to the form settings tab, scroll down and toggle the legacy mode on or off.

Once you turn legacy mode off, you might have to move things around. Play with spacing, padding and margins to space things to look right.

If you’ve purchased a CSS coded form - the provider will offer updates soon (or already have) about any changes.

Containers

Containers - or what used to be called columns - are a way to group your content. The new form builder has the following settings for containers:

• Number of columns: you can choose the number of columns that make up your container - 1 to 4. You can also toggle ‘show title’ to add a title to your container.

• Container width: to adjust how wide it will appear on the page. 100% width will span the entire width of the screen. 

• Content width: to adjust how wide your content will be inside the container. If set at 100%, your content will span the entire container width.

• Background color: set a color by selecting with the color picker or by entering a hex code.

• Background image: add an image as the background of the container. Dubsado recommends that you use images wider than 2500 px.

  Tip: Remember that gifs also work as images in Dubsado - so you can add an image that looks more like a video to your forms.

• Background image opacity: make the background image less visible. This works great if you have text inside the container.

  100% opacity means that only the image is visible. 0% opacity means that only the background color will be visible. The lower the number the more the background color will seep through.

• Padding: adds space inside the container. This is so the elements aren’t sticking to the top, bottom or sides of the container. Adds whitespace so things aren’t too scrunched up together.

• Margins: adds whitespace outside container - not inside it. Like padding, you can add space to the top, bottom or right/left sides. 

Even if your form content is in a single column - it’s a good idea to place your elements inside of a container. This helps you to duplicate many elements at the same time. Also to drag them to another part of the form, or style the container by adding a background image or color.

Containers with background image AND background color

The container below has a background image AND a background color. The image opacity is 5% to make the image less visible so the text is readable. It adds a visual element to the section.

Containers inside of containers

The section below is three column container. It has a beige background, 100% width and 80px padding at the top and bottom.

In each of the columns of the exterior container, I added another container that has a single column.

The interior containers have a white background. Inside each container I added an image (the orange icons) and text block. Each column has 30px padding on all sides to give some breathing room between the columns.

This container looks like a section from a website. Which is why I’m so excited about containers. 

Using full width images

Full width images are one of the amazing features of the new Dubsado form builder. They allow your forms to look more like your website.

Before, this was something that needed CSS code. 

You can choose to add a container that uses an image as a background - and then add text on top of it. This works great as a header section.

Or you can add a container with an image inside it - which can serve as a section all on its own. This works well as a divider.

In the example below the exterior container has two columns with an image as a background. The container width is 100%, the content width is 85% and there is no padding or margins.

The left hand side column has another container inside it with text and a white background. This container has 50px padding all around and 200px margin at the top and bottom.

This allows you to mimic a website hero section.

Image from unsplash @spacejoy

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Adding elements

You have several ways of adding new elements to your form.

You can drag and drop elements from the element library on the left hand side directly into your form, or you can hover over any element and click the plus sign to select an element to add directly below it.

Within a container you’ll see a plus sign inside each column. Click that and the list of element options will pop up for you to add them inside the column.

Editing text inline

I love this new change.

Double click a text box or any other element that has text - like questions or packages - to make changes inline.

Click the checkmark at the top left of the element or click another spot in the form to complete your change.

Another cool feature, is that clicking on an element will open up the settings in the left hand menu.

The New Dubsado Builder settings and menus

I’ll go over the different menus that are now available. I’m specifically going over the options and settings available for proposals.

Form navigation panel

The form builder itself looks a bit different now. The options and settings are all on the left hand side navigation panel. The following panels or tabs are now visible:

Element Library: the element options in the library remain the same.

• Container (formerly column)

• Text box

• Images

• Short answer

• Free response

• Date select

• Package

• Project tracking

• Dropdown

• Checkboxes

• Multiple choice

• File uploader

• HTML block

General form settings: most settings remain the same as before.

For proposals, you can include contracts and invoices. To allow clients to choose several packages or apply discounts.

You can toggle on the public proposal option. Once toggled on, you can select adding: workflows, redirect URL, project status and title for any submitted public proposal. You can also set expiration dates on your form and set completion alerts.

The biggest change in this tab is the option to turn the legacy mode on or off.

Form styling panel: these options appeared under settings in the previous form builder.

Same as before you can set the question styling, font size and font color. 

The general styling option is new and allows you to add padding to the very top and very bottom of your form.

Dubsado has added the option to include custom CSS in the form styling. This is to apply CSS options that will impact the entire form - like fonts, colors, etc.

Share panel: the embed code or direct link to the proposal will appear in this tab. It will only work for public proposals. 

I LOVE the fact that it's a click to copy the links. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I tried to highlight the entire share link in the previous form builder. It would always close before I could select the entire link.

It’s the little things sometimes. 

Advantages of the new Dubsado form builder

After using the form builder for a while, it offers:

• More flexibility and design options when building forms in Dubsado.

• Containers are a game changer. The option to span the width of a page, add colors and images to the background is so amazing!!

• Faster to make changes with inline text editing.

• Reduces the need for CSS coded forms. While they can be very helpful to provide you with more styling options, are also quite hard to use for most people.

What would I like to see added?

• Proper previews. The design view and the preview are very different. It means you have to constantly preview your form. To make sure that what you’re doing is actually what you intended to do.

• Column width. Having the ability to set the width of each column that makes up a container would be amazing. Allowing for the form builder to build masonry galleries.

• Color palettes. The ability to save a few colors as a palette and access them to avoid having to punch in hex codes all the time. 

• Spacers. It’s great to have padding and margins on containers. But sometimes you need a spacer between two pieces of text. So you don't have to hit enter to add spacing (which can get glitchy sometimes).

Video Tutorial: The New Dubsado Form Builder

In this video tutorial I’ll take you through the changes in the new Dubsado form builder. I'll show you how to use it to create beautiful forms without needing any CSS code.

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