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ProForm is an advanced drag and drop form management module for ExpressionEngine 2.0. ProForm is the first ever drag and drop form builder for ExpressionEngine, designed to make creating forms much easier for developers as well as content editors.

To celebrate EECI 2011, ProForm is available for a limited time at a reduced initial price of only $25.00. You can find it on Devot:ee.

Features
* Forms fully configured in the Control Panel
* Drag & drop form layout in Control Panel
* Full ExpressionEngine template support for rendering multiple forms from a single template (or multiple templates if you prefer)
* Mailing list opt-in
* CAPTCHA support to help prevent spam
* File uploads
* Send notifications, also rendered using EE templates, to admins and/or any email address entered in the form
* CodeIgniter based validation including content filtering and encoding options (required, valid e-mail, strip HTML, base64 encode, etc.)
* Plentiful hooks, allowing third party customization
* Separate database table for each form - no more field count limits, easy to work with in custom code
* IP address and user agent recording
* Optional database Encryption
* Preset values for use in share forms such as Tell a Friend to prevent email spam

Links
* Purchase on Devot:ee
* Documentation

Congratulations! 
Are proform and safecracker totally independent of each other? 
Thanks, Chris

ProForm currently creates forms that are separate from SafeCracker. However, integration between the two is definitely planned (and about 80% implemented).

Wow!  That was the answer I was hoping for.  I’ve already purchased proform and am very excited about the possibilities.  Keep up the innovative work.  Chris

Hello,
I am building a site with ExpressonEngine and I need to make use of a lot of forms.  It’s a real-estate site and I am making it so my client can enter property listings from the front end.  I’ve been using SafeCracker to build it so far, but have run into a few frustrations.  One of the biggest is the issue of handling notifications.  Seems like ProForm may help sole this issue.

Do you have a more complete demo for this add-on?  I’d be interested in seeing it in action before purchasing.

Thanks,
Matthew

I don’t currently have an online demo available, however I am planning to release a video demo showing ProForm’s capabilities at some point in the near future.

The documentation here may help you out a bit: http://metasushi.com/docs/proform/

I can also answer any specific questions about ProForm’s functionality of course. Let me know what you need to do.

airways,
Thanks for the quick reply.

Here’s my quick story…

I’ve been building this real-estate site using Joomla+Seblod, which is a powerful combination.  For a second real-estate site, I decided to purchase an EE license and build it simultaneously in ExpressionEngine so I can do a thorough comparison.

No question, creating templates and calling up the information I need anywhere I need it using tags and channel references is a huge plus.  Also, ExpressionEngine is terrific at allowing me to call “publish” or “gather” fields in combinations on the same page.

But ExpressionEngine is weaker in two crucial areas:
1. Depth of field types.
2. Notifications.  I cannot quite understand how to handle notifications to the site admin and to the submitter after a form is submitted in ExpressionEngine.

So I guess my questions for ProForm come down to this:
1. Do you have a list of available field types in ProForm?
2. Do you have more detail on ProForm’s notification system?

Thanks,
Matthew

Field types
Field types in ProForm decide how data is stored in the database, rather than how it is presented to the user. ProForm does not render the form for you, which allows you to retain 100% control over your markup, so you are free to set up any kind of UI for each field type as you wish. The built in field types are listed here: Field Types

The default template is just a reference, onto which you can add any kind of markup you need to. You could easily add CKEditor to the textarea fields, for instance, or load a jQuery UI Data Picker for particular fields.

So basically ProForm can handle really anything you want. It just may take a bit more tweaking in the front-end as any public facing form would.

Notifications
Notifications in ProForm are based on the same templates that you’re learning to love in EE itself. Any module or plugin tag can be used in ProForm to generate very complex notifications.

The email address to send notifications to can be set in one of three way.

1. In the form’s template code through the notify=“[email protected]|[email protected]” param.

2. On the form’s settings you can specify a list of email addresses to send a notification to.

3. You can send notifications to email addresses entered on the form itself - for instance, to send a notification to the person who submitted it, or to allow the user to select someone to notify from a dropdown (I did this exact thing for a client recently).

You can read more about notification settings here: Form Settings
And more about notification templates here: Notification Templates

airways,
This looks terrific.  Yes, I am a big fan of the way ExpressionEngine separates the styling from the functions.

ProForm seems to be a nice expansion of the capabilities available in SafeCracker.

I’m assuming that you have plans for future development of ProForm?  Is there a place where users can discuss details and get involved in the development?

I want to establish a test case that ExpressionEngine can lead to the kind of site I have in mind.  My plan for now is to build a version of the real-estate site on my development domain, and if I can make the model work then that be the official site for this client.

I’m going to purchase ProForm and dig into it.

Thanks again,
Matthew

ProForm isn’t currently a complete replacement for SafeCracker - and probably never will be. I am hoping to have full integration with SafeCracker eventually, so that a ProForm form can actually generate use of the many available custom fieldtypes, and saves it’s data into an EE channel. That is a bit far off at this point, but ProForm is a very appropriate tool for any kind of public facing form that does not have as an absolute requirement that it store data in a EE channel.

I am sure that ExpressionEngine can handle what you want to do, there are a lot of awesome add-ons out there. I have yet to see a site that couldn’t be built in ExpressionEngine, honestly. 😊

@airways, this looks great and might be a solution for a site I’m working on. One question though, is it possible to relate a form to a specific entry, eg on the publish page have a select to to pick the form to show with that entry?

Rob,

Right now you can easily do this with a SP Table Select field set to use the exp_proform_forms table and with both fields set to form_name (due to what appears to be a bug in SP Table Select). At some point, I’ll be creating a custom fieldtype that will do this for you without requiring SP Table Select.

If this field was named “page_form_name”, in your page template you would get the form attached to a page by calling the tag like so:

{exp:proform:form form_name="{page_form_name}"}
...
{/exp:proform:form}

At some point I am planning to create an additional field type, or a module publish tab, that will allow you to create a form directly on an entry. That is some time down the road however as it will require reworking the way that the form editor works to fit into a publish page.

Thanks for the info airways, looking forward to the fieldtype!

The newest version of ProForm, 0.38 BETA is now up.

This is a recommended update for users that use the features effected by the updates. This update also introduces flexible Reply-To options as requested by ProForm users.

This update is available through Devot:ee as well as through provided download license codes.

Updates
* Added default Reply-To address to form settings to set a Reply-To value for all notifications sent for the form
* Added Reply-To fields to notification list and both notification field settings groups. This allows using the value of a form to override the Reply-To header of notification emails.
* Updated thank_you_url to default to form URL value (previously this defaulted to the current_url, even if the form_url had been changed)
* Added logic to remove any double slashes from form URLs
* Fixed error in referencing default values when submitting form
* Fixed display order of columns headings on Form Entries listing to match data columns

Hi airways,

Does ProForm display form entries in the CP?

Thanks.