Blair Williams

Everything is an Experiment

Formidable Pro: The Best Form Builder for WordPress

Formidable Pro: The Best Form Builder for WordPress

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An amazing new plugin launched last weekend. 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 one of my good friends — 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). But I've known Steph for years and she's literally obsessed over this plugin so I know that if there are any problems — even small ones they will be fixed lightning fast.

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. I actually think Steph isn't charging enough for this plugin — I've seen other form building plugins out there going for upwards of $200. 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 next week. I'll try to keep everyone here informed about updates to it and how it's working for me though — so I can hold Steph's feet to the fire 🙂 …

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Comments

  3. Ok, Since there is no demo, and no trail version, I would bet this would be a very hard sell to anyone. There are ton’s of form plugins and even services, so it’s a tight market.

  4. Thanks for your comments above. I went to the site, paid my $35, but was never given instructions as to how to download the plug-in. The web site is no help. Any suggestions?

  6. Hello,
    Thanks for the great plugin, very simple & elegant form.
    Just quick question, where i can change the HEIGHT of the fields? it’s look very narrow right now

    Also i will try to work on a translate it into Hebrew.

    Thanks,
    Pinto.

  7. I am looking for a great contact form as well as a registration form that would require the user to login with a username and password as well as collect some additional data. Does your formidable pro offer those features?

    • Thanks for the great post Blair! Still waiting for those updates…. 🙂 LaTanga, you can require login to allow users to fill-in a form, and make it editable for them as well. So you could use it as a type of profile, although the data wouldn’t save anywhere else. You could add that easily enough into a small add-on plugin though.

  8. It sounds good, but we need to collect information and then display it in WP as a list. The F-Pro sites has no examples of how to display the resulting data in WP, which is discouraging. I hesitate to pay for software without even seeing a screenshot, much less a working example. Maybe list some sites that are already using it, or even a demo site?

    • Rick you’ll need to contact the author of F-Pro as we cannot answer those questions for you here.

    • So I’m very late on this one. It’s possible I’ve already answered your questions. If not, the reason for no screenshots or demo sites is because there isn’t a very good way to demo the functionality since displaying the data is 100% user created. You can take a look at “Display Collected Data” at http://formidablepro.com/features/. And please contact me with questions.

  9. Hi Blair. I have searched high and low for a tutorial on how to use Formidable and cannot find one. The plugin site is not informative. I just want to know how to create a form. I tried to drag fields into the form but nothing seems to happen. Do you or anyone know where i can find a tutorial or can you tell me how to get the fields into my form?

    • I’m not sure but the formidable pro author’s blog is at blog.strategy11.com — I think she’s got a contact form setup there — I’d just ask her. Hope that helps.

    • You’ve probably already figured this out by now or given up. If not, you have a javascript conflict with another plugin. Please deactivate other plugins and try switching out your theme to find it. If you need more help you can post a question in the forum. Thanks!

  11. The form we have automatically has the question in the space where the client is supposed to put the response. The question may be several words. My client doesn’t want these questions to download in the CSV (for each applicant). Any hints on how to get a more concise spreadsheet? Also, is there a way to limit characters in a response or attach a file like a resume?

  12. How does formidable handle email? when a user fills in the form, and I have it set up to send them an automated response, how do I know if the email has bounced?

  14. Hi Blair,

    I agree. Formidable Pro is a great plugin.

    I’ve actually just released an add-on to the plugin called Formidable Plus. What it does is add a TABLE field type, allowing people to capture tabular data (like financials vs. timeline or details vs. product or whatever).

    I think this is a unique feature across all of the WordPress forms plugins. I don’t know of any other form builder that allows for this type of field. Hopefully it’ll help Steph’s plugin soar even higher.

    Details about Formidable Plus are at topquark.com/extend/plugins/formidable-plus. Hopefully people find it useful.

    Cheers
    Trevor Mills
    TopQuark.com

  15. If you need total customization of form fields and its total looks then FormBerry is the way to go. You can do almost any types of fields with conditional logic and add each submitted name and emails to your favorite autoresponder automatically. Very cool! it’s formberry – http://www.formberry.com