Hi Nick,
One of the first things to do is to look in the bug tracker. If you scroll down you can select all the bugs for specific packages.
I had some issues setting up FTM a last month. I didn't have a variable, but I'm pretty sure it was the confirm message that was missing. Also, it needed a quote tag somewhere to get it to display the HTML instead of dump it on the page.
Basically, all these things are documented a bit in the bug tracker...
resolved ftm bugs:
https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/?format=table&f%5fcomponent=170607&project%5fid=56106&f%5fstate=8
open ftm bugs:
https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/?format=table&f%5fcomponent=170607&project%5fid=56106&f%5fstate=7
I finally got it to work, but I had to hack the confirm message feature a bit because I'm relatively a beginner on the tech side too. Good luck
Eric