WordPress Form Creator

Posted on July 9, 2009
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UltimateIDX WP Form Creator Plug-in

UltimateIDX is wrapping up the final edits in their newest WordPress plug-in titled WP Form Creator. The plug-in has been in development for quite some time with countless revisions and modifications to make the process of creating forms for WordPress bloggers a snap. As developers of real estate websites, the UltimateIDX has encountered its fair share of frustrations from blog owners that struggle with the inclusion of forms in their pages and posts. Although there are dozens of options out there many of which are exceptional in design and features, the challenge has been keeping the rendered form fully XHTML compliant. Naturally the motive is to ensure its implementation by blog developers and other professionals who demand compliant standard websites.

During the development it became evident that in order to achieve full XHTML compliance there would need to be some way to include user defined HTML markup. The option or need in many instances for using user defined markup would return us right back to what we had hoped to avoid, a complex plug-in. Most bloggers are not coders nor do they wish to use HTML markup but in order to make it fully design flexible we opted include the feature allowing designers and coders a great deal of flexibility in controlling the generated output.

After publishing the WP Menu Creator we had learned many many lessons which we would apply to all future plug-ins beginning with the need to keep it as flexible yet as powerful as we possibly could without crossing the line to making it exclusively a developers plug-in. The Menu Creator has certainly been perceived as such for the most part because we didn’t include any actual menu CSS markup. As mentioned in previous posts, the motive behind this was our concern that users of the Menu Creator would draw conclusion that it was limited to only those CSS Menu examples we had included with the plug-in. The WP Form Creator, like the WP Menu Creator are both too flexible by design to articulate their capabilities for designers by including a few snippets or layouts. For this reason, again, the UltimateIDX has contracted a studio to produce a few instructional tutorials to help jump start any blogger in using the plug-in quickly and effectively without a great deal of effort.

The process of creating the forms took a few code examples from the Menu Creator by using some jQuery drag and drop features that make it as user friendly as we could. UltimateIDX still has the plug-in as a beta product but in all the tests we had done over the past weeks have proven quite successful as we test and tweak time and time again to generate the absolute cleanest XHTML compliant code designers and users are certain to demand. When creating forms; you simply drag the form elements to the layout window, set the parameters for each form element, and add any custom markup you desire (including images) and you’re ready to publish. The UltimateIDX will be releasing the first version as 1.0 but should be considered BETA at this point. So, what I did was quickly knocked out a fast (not to pretty) video preview of the plug-in which you may find of interest. Although this version is loaded with some pretty common jQuery stuff, the final product will look a little different than what you will see in this video. http://www.jaredritchey.com/tutorials/WPFormCreator/

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