Our wordpress form builder has evolved a lot over the past few months. With the help of a few patient customers, we have identified and fixed some major bugs. The product now seems fairly stable and we are hoping to extend its features. This post is dedicated to summarizing our current position and what you can expect for our WordPress Drag and Drop Form Builder in the upcoming months
DEVELOPMENT PATH
This plugin started as a simple request to integrate popular form builders into BePro Listings. With the open architecture of the plugin, we thought this would be easy and were sorely mistaken. It seems that most form builders are very poor at storing information that will be searchable and compared. With search being one of the primary focus of BePro Listings, this immediately ended all hopes of using any popular existing form builder to extend our functionality
The thing is, BePro Listings is designed to scale to millions of records. New database tables are created for niche information like real estate and vehicles. Having all of this info crammed into one column, in one table, was not something we were willing to revert to. Instead, we created a platform that would accept our advanced method of storing information while still making it easy for the user.
Luckily, there are jquery form builders available which reduced the development time to create an interface. We then enhanced the code to support the various types of information we wanted to facilitate. We also adapted it to respect the way BePro Listings works, e.g. one “item name” per form.
WHATS NEXT FOR THIS FORM BUILDER
The future is bright. With the support of early adopters, we have the funding necessary to not only maintain the plugin but extend its features. Here are the major points
- Email Notifications – Auto generate notifications in BePro Email (if installed) with each form creation
- Helpful Hints – Warnings and notices about the form e.g. submit button missing
- Multiple Pages – Split form into multiple steps
- Multiple Columns – Instead of one column, set the width 1/3, 1/2, etc
We believe these steps will make the plugin more useful to a wider set of needs. We are always open to feedback and suggestions for features you think we should add. We are creating features not available anywhere else online and we appreciate your support as we forge ahead.
INTEGRATION OPTIONS
Since BePro Listings is Buddypress compatible, our form builder is Buddypress compatible also. Same thing goes for supporting Google Maps and the other base BePro Listings features. We designed the Form Builder to faciltiate easy manipulation of many stock BePro Listings features.
We hope to evolve some of our other features that are not provided by BePro Liistings like our notification system via BePro Email. Although the plugin does provide options for users to setup notifications in BePro Email, we hope to make this automatic in the future.
CONCLUSION
Our BePro Listings Form Builder was created because of feedback from our users. Its growth has been funded and largely directed by the support of our users. We hope you continue to support our wordpress Form Builder and look forward to on boarding new customers. We understand that users need the information they collect to do a lot more than sit in a table column and BePro Listings will continue to provide a solution
