Formidable Pro
An amazing new plugin launched in Jan, 2010. Its called Formidable Pro and is hands down the best, most innovative and easy to use form builder for WordPress I’ve ever used. The author of this plugin is — Stephanie Wells over at Strategy 11 and has done a remarkable job.
I guess calling this plugin a simple “form builder” is a bit of an understatement — people with no knowledge of HTML, CSS or programming can create extremely complex forms with ease. In fact, you can script and build all kinds of user interactions on your site with Formidable Pro. Check out some of these features:
- Fully AJAXified Form Builder – This makes it dead simple to build any kind of form you want within seconds. With pure, drag & drop controls and in-place editing you don’t need to know the first thing about HTML or CSS to be extremely effective immediately.
- A Huge Array of Field Types – Build your form from these field types (with pre-defined input styles and validation): Text Input, Paragraph Input, Multiple Selection (check boxes), Select One (radio buttons), Drop Downs,Section Dividers, Phone, Email, Date (with a Javascript date selector), Hidden Field, Hidden User ID, Website/URL, Image URL, Scale (1 to 10 input), Dynamic Fields (dependent on other data in the field) and even File Uploads!
- Fully AJAXified Form Styler — You *have* to see this one to believe it — I’m not kidding, you have 100% control over what your forms look like. Not only can they be easily embedded in your site but you can use this graphical form styler to add whatever polish you want.
- Ability to Embed or Link Directly to Forms – Quickly send out a survey to your email list or post a poll on your website, no matter how you want to deliver it, again, Formidable makes it easy.
- Form Templates — These are pre-configured forms that you can choose from. Formidable Pro ships with 4 preset form types — a contact, real estate listing, bug/defect report and an address collection form — all of which are common types of forms. But you can create your own templates and use them to create forms instantly. Steph has plans to continue adding preset template types as updates come out.
- Statistical Reports – Once you’ve sent your forms out to your audience you can see exactly how many responded and the breakdowns for each of the fields in your form. This feature is especially effective when surveying your audience.
- Data Analysis and Export — You can view all the entries from your form and export them to csv.
- Setup Custom Displays to Showcase your Data Externally — Do you want to show the results of a survey or a poll? Quickly setup a custom display and you can show the results of your survey or form on your external website.
I just can’t wait to start sending out surveys now that I’m in possession of this killer plugin!
Really, the only downside I can see to this plugin is that it’s brand new — so I suppose there could be problems with it here and there (all though in my usage of it this week, I’ve seen no signs of any instability — it feels exceptionally solid).
The other thing that’s really impressive about this plugin is that it is so inexpensive. The single website version is only $35 and for that amount you still get lifetime support and updates. And in addition to this, she’s got a 30 day money back guarantee.
Overall, this plugin is well thought out, feels extremely solid and is impressively powerful. I’m a Formidable Pro affiliate, but even if I weren’t, I’d still highly recommend it — I’m switching all of my surveys over to it as we speak. I’ll try to keep everyone here informed about updates to it and how it’s working for me ..
