Why I wrote this plugin?

@3ruce asked this question, and I felt it was worth answering for others to read, so I am putting the answer in a sticky post.

I have worked on different projects with a number of paid-for form plugins, the most sophisticated being formidablePro and Gravity Forms. There is two things that irritated me with these plugins,

1. their “free” version was very limited – this is an issue because I also work pro-bono on some projects for NGOs who just don’t have the budgets to buy licenses. FormisablePro claims to give free licenses for NGO type of work, and I applied for one a project and never even got a reply, so that’s all marketing blah-blah (which they seem to have removed now anyway).
2. these plugin save their data into complex custom tables – this is done for obvious reasons to stop coders writing their own extensions to move a submitted form into a post and make the whole process a lot more WP friendly

These 2 points for me are really against the philosophy to WP in the first place. The strength of this platform comes from so many coders contributing their solution under the GPL.

So when I started looking for alternative GPL solutions to forms, Contact Form 7 was by far the most widely used (and as a result has many extensions to work with), but also the one that seemed to have survived the demise of time.

It was also important for me to stick to one plugin from project to project, regardless of budget, because it meant I could build my understanding and knowledge over time, so I stuck to CF7. It has its flaws, and ought to be re-written, which I am actually slowly doing since the author doesn’t seem very cooperative.

So bottom line, I wrote this plugin because I needed it, and I am now able to build more complex front-end data-capture interfaces in a timely and efficient manner. Storing submissions in custom tables makes no sense to me in the long run, I would rather work with the default core WP structure, so it seemed logical to save submissions directly into custom posts.

My approach to problems is trying to find the general solution that will fit as wide a range of similar problems. So through my commercial projects, I finance these plugins when a problem offers the opportunity to do so. I also make use of many other excellent free(dom) plugins, so writing such plugins for the community is my way of giving back too, and that too is important for me as member of this community.

Well I hope others find this plugin useful. This plugin also does away with the CF7 custom WP_List_Table implementation, and instead uses the WP default custom post table, which means that users can also hook-up and modify the CF7 table to include their own columns, such as for example a submission count.

• This topic was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Aurovrata Venet.