First impressions of Cornerstone Forms

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#1

Hey Charlie,

It’s amazing to have native forms now and my imagination is running wild with all the possibilities. Content filtering is something I’m especially looking forward to trying. Haven’t had much time yet but hopefully I can free up some more time over the next two weeks to dig in deeper.

It seems like it can do a lot and it’s quite something to wrap your head around initially. I must say that it’s overwhelming an a little complex. This leads me to think that CS Forms is primarily meant for power users and developers, is that correct? It seems too complex for normal users to just drag and drop and click a form together easily like they are perhaps used to doing with the more traditional forms plugins like Forminator and Gravity Forms.
Is it meant to completely replace those plugins or should we consider it more of a supplemental tool?

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#2

I agree with @JvP, definitely for the power user. The TCO demos gave a taste of what can be done, but are not desperately helpful in understanding the dynamics, as so much seems to happen under the hood. Thanks for the in-progress docs, @charlie!

That said, I have spent the afternoon and evening working on a basic, traditional contact form and am pleased to say that it does all and more than WPForms Pro does! It took a bit of trial and error, but does all I need and more - great thought has gone into this by our friends at Themeco. The one thing I would say is that a few more tooltips for the settings field would be useful!

@charlie, I will be starting to look at the filtering over the coming days - a new project, which is absolutely perfect for CS Forms. I hope you don’t mind me throwing a load of questions your way, as the filtering (Archive Layouts and Woocommerce Layouts) is something I think is one of the most powerful CS Forms has.

All in all, from my initial testing, the out-of-the-box layout of the fields beats all standard forms plugins by a long-shot (no custom CSS needed to sort out the basics). Well done!

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#3

Hi,
i agree with all points above :slight_smile:

@Charlie: how can i connect other newsletter tools. I use thenewsletterplugin for most of my sites. can i also make a woo order via the form? can i generate pdf files at the end as an action (so i can create a layout and save it as pdf). where can i see the docu?
And where in the db is the data stored? I need to use this data to make an export. Or is there a export option for all submitted forms?

I will try this out today for a new project and will get back with my feedback.

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#4

Appreciate the feedback. We are trying to solve more problems then the other plugins mentioned are trying to solve so it’s going to be a more dynamic plugin. That being said we are going to make some updates to make a majority of use cases easier to do. Some of this might just be a learning curve related and could be solved through our docs and training.

The data in the examples you were given are primarily stored in the “Form Submission” post type. Something we provide for you. But the plugin can insert any kind of Post type, Term, Option, or anything else in the WordPress system. There isn’t any sort of payment processing, but we will be taking a poll later on which direction we should go next with Cornerstone Forms, one of them being payment processing.

We were discussing this internally today, but does “Post Upsert” as an action sound too confusing?

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#5

I had to google Upsert, just saying

definitely would be great to link CS Forms to a payment processor like Stripe. I have a number of client’s that would lap that up

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#6

agreed. Upsert doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue.

#7

Sounds good.

It’s good to have the Form Submissions CPT to view submissions in the back-end. I’m not sure how the Add New Form Submission capability is useful. When would you manually add a form submission?

Do you think it may be good to make the contents of form submissions non-editable? Someone could deliberately, or by accident, alter the data a user has submitted.

It would be convenient to also see the form name and have a link to the page(s) where the form is embedded, in addition to the Form ID which is already shown.

And as for “Post Upsert”, I figured it meant something like “Create Post”, but I wasn’t sure. I’d prefer “Create Post” because that is what everyone is already familiar with, especially in WordPress. Upsert is more of a database term?

#8

You probably would never manually add a form submission. At least, the form itself would already do that. I can remove that button.

I can see the argument for making the content of form submission non-editable. But could also see a world where you want to edit data. I couldn’t find an easy way to just show content without hiding the editor, but I’ll keep this in mind.

I’m not sure how’d we do this without just having a Form editor similar to a Page, or a full blown form post type. I can think how’d we do something similar to this though. A similar request has been asked for Components.

Have a great day.

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#9

It’s been a while since I’ve used anything other than Forminator so I don’t know how the other form plugins do it, but in Forminator submissions are non-editable. Your approach of submissions being a post type is really cool though because it is way more flexible. If you can figure out how to make the submission contents non-editable by default with perhaps an edit button you must deliberately click first to edit, that would be perfect.
Perhaps it’s ultimately better to not use the default content editor there?

#10

Me too! Glad you admitted it first :joy: