Forms & Collections
Build forms for your members, control who can open them, and group them into sets people can browse.
Forms let you put a real tool in front of your members — an intake form, a questionnaire, a calculator, an application. Collections group several of them into a set, so you present a toolkit rather than a list.
Both are Pro features. You'll find them in Settings → Forms.
Who can open a form
This is the setting worth getting right first, and it's on each form's Settings tab under Who can open it.
| Option | What it means |
|---|---|
| Members only | Only signed-in members of this Coterie. The link still works — it asks them to sign in first. |
| Anyone with the link | Anyone at all, signed in or not. |
Members only is the default, and it's enforced on the form itself rather than by hiding a link. Someone who isn't a member gets a not-found page even if a member forwards them the URL.
"Anyone with the link" exists for one good reason: a form is a natural way to bring new people in. An application, a waitlist, an enquiry form — none of those can require membership, because the person filling it in isn't a member yet.
A form's own setting always wins. Putting a public form inside a collection does not make it members-only, and the collection's settings page tells you which of its forms are open to anyone so you find out there rather than afterwards.
The card
Wherever a form appears as a tile — in a collection, or in your members' menu — it shows a name, one line, and an icon. That's the Card tab on each form.
- Description — up to 140 characters. Leave it blank and the card shows just the title.
- Icon — one of twenty. It takes the colour of that form's own theme, so you pick an icon and see the colour it will actually be.
The Card tab shows a live preview using the same component your members see, so what you approve is what they get.
This used to sit inside the form builder. It moved because it isn't part of building the form — it's how the finished form is presented. It also means there's exactly one place to change it.
Collections
A collection is a named group of your forms. Create one from Settings → Forms — either the Add collection button under the forms table, or Add collection in the Create Form dropdown.
Each collection has:
- A name, description and icon, from the same twenty icons a form uses
- The forms in it, in the order you choose
- A Members can see it switch
Members can see it
Off by default. Most people assemble a collection over a few sittings, and an empty or half-built collection isn't something you want members browsing in the meantime. Turn it on when it's ready.
A form can be in more than one collection
Deliberately. You'll often want several collections that differ by which forms they hold, and duplicating a form just to reuse it would be worse than letting one form appear in two places.
The cost is that editing one collection can change what another shows. So each form in the list tells you where else it appears — "Also in Client onboarding, Templates" — and the picker says how many collections a form is already in before you add it.
A form appears at most once inside a given collection, and only published forms can be added. A draft or closed form would be a dead end for a member, so it isn't offered.
Ordering
Both the collections themselves and the forms inside each one use up and down arrows. The order you set is the order members see.
What members see
Each published collection gets its own entry under Resources in every member's sidebar, above any custom links you've added, showing the icon you picked and its name. Opening one shows the collection's description as a heading and its forms as cards, four to a row on a wide screen and fewer as the space narrows.
Clicking anywhere on a card opens that form inside the Coterie, with the sidebar still there and a link back to the collection — members never get dropped onto a bare form page with no way back.
A collection only ever lists forms a member can actually open, so it never advertises four tools and then shows two. If every form in a collection has since been unpublished, members are told it's empty rather than shown a blank panel.
Deleting a collection
Deleting a collection deletes the grouping only. Every form inside it survives and keeps working — on its own URL, in your custom menu, and in any other collection it belongs to.
The confirmation says so, and names how many forms are affected, because it's the kind of thing worth being certain about before clicking.
What forms and collections deliberately don't do
Coterie is not an embed platform, and this is a decision rather than a gap:
- No embedding on other websites. There are no embed keys and no allowed-domain list to maintain. Forms and collections live inside your Coterie.
- No separate domain. A form inherits whatever domain your Coterie already uses, including a custom one.
- No public collections. A collection is a members' area surface. If you want something reachable by anyone, that's a form set to "Anyone with the link".
The reason is that Coterie knows who your members are. Membership is a stronger control than checking which website is framing a page, and it doesn't need a list of URLs kept up to date.