Defining forms in Joomla!

Joomla’s Form class simplifies and standardizes the way you create HTML forms for your web projects. It was introduced in Joomla! 1.5, and it has improved since then.

Forms in Joomla! are defined in an XML file where you add all the fields your form needs and their basic properties. Joomla! then processes this information and generates a proper form and field definition.

This process saves you from dealing with HTML input field definition and standardizes the way you create your forms. It also allows you to use more elaborate interfaces in your extensions with very little effort. A nice example of this is the accessiblemedia field that was introduced in Joomla! 4, which not only allows the user to include an image, but it comes with some accessibility features out of the box.

But best of all, handling forms in Joomla! is like magic when using Joomla! MVC in our developments.

There are three main use cases we can consider for using Joomla...