F & M developers identified several basic uses for the LitCrit Outlook form: writing a new critique, reading a critique (by an administrator) to approve or reject it, reading a posted critique, and editing a critique posted previously by the reader. To support these uses and their subvariations, differing user interfaces were designed to offer certain fields as writable and others as read-only. To allow for the different user interfaces, the developers created different forms — that is, forms of different message classes — all based on IPM.Post.
When editing in design mode (see Opening a Form in Design Mode), you see that every form can have multiple pages. You can move between these pages by clicking their tabs, in a way similar to moving between worksheets in Microsoft Excel. You can include any number of pages in your published form. You can also optionally create two versions of a page: compose, meant to accept user input, and read, meant to display text or images to readers. All the pages of a given form, in both their read and compose versions, have the same message class. For more information on displaying these pages and their versions, see Controlling Message Class Use.
The topics in the remainder of this section explain how the different variations of LitCrit were combined to provide the facets of its functionality.