It can be rather satisfying when you no longer need your form.

Maybe you’ve received all the entries you need and you’re ready to start digging through your data with a report or you’re done with a major project and you can finally put your form to bed.

Whatever the reason, when you do close your form, there is always a chance a straggler will still attempt to view it. When this happens, they’ll see a little message telling them the form isn’t accepting entries. Depending on if you made the form private or if it hit the entry limit, the message will be different:

Those do the job. They let your user know the form isn’t accepting entries, which may be all you really need to tell them. What if you want to change the message though? Perhaps you want to tell your users the form is closed, but they can get check out your website or you just want to show them a picture of a dinosaur eating pizza.

There’s not a setting that will let you change that message on your form, but as with most things Wufoo, where there’s a will there’s a way. We can keep the form “live” and hide the submit button and all the fields in the form so that the only thing left is a section break with your personal message.

First off, we need to make sure the form is active again. So if the form has hit an entry limit, make sure to reset that or make the form public once again.

After that, we need to make all fields in the form admin only. That way, you hide the fields on your form from everyone but yourself.

Here’s how you do it:

• Click the Forms tab at the top of your page.
• Click Edit on your form.
• Now click on your field and change the Show Field to to Everyone.

Job’s a good’un. Now add a section break field to the form and add your custom message in there. Your form should be looking a bit like this:

All the fields are admin only, which means they won’t show up in the form, but you keep all the data you received from those fields. However, if you view the form, you can still see the submit tab, which looks a bit…rubbish.

We can add some simple custom CSS to get rid of that title, the grey line below it, and the submit button.

That CSS will use “display: none;” to essentially hide the submit button, title and grey line from the form. All that’s left is to apply the finishing touch by enlarging the size of the section break text via the Theme Designer. Put it all together and the final piece should look a bit like this:

You’ve got yourself a custom message for a closed form and a T-Rex with a full belly. Beautiful.

And behold, another post with the most(est) from our expert, Kane. Questions for him? You know where to go!