If you are unsure about whether to take the plunge with WS Form, do yourself a favour and dive in. Especially if you’re a developer. Whilst it’s great for non-coders out there, if you have some developer chops the stuff you can do with it is amazing.
I was a loyal Formidable Forms (FF) user. Don’t get me wrong, FF is a great form plugin – BUT, it’s soooo expensive if you need/want all the features.
So I had been looking for a viable and more cost-effective alternative for quite a long time (I looked at many of the big boys out there like Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms and others), but they all came up short with things that FF did that they didn’t (in particular Views), and/or they were just as expensive as FF.
Say hello to WS Form.
Initially, I had quite a lot of back and forth with Mark, the plugin’s author, asking about this and that, before committing. I was pretty skeptical. I drove him mad (blush), and after a bit of a start/stop (from me) I finally took the plunge and went all in converting all my FF forms to WS Form.
WS Form does have migrate options for many of the form builders out there, but FF wasn’t one, unfortunately. However, even doing this manually wasn’t too terrible to do (once a form had been recreated I was able to export that to other sites and quickly tweak as needed).
There is a small learning curve as WS Form’s approach is a bit different to most other form builders. But once you get your head around it you see that WS Form is way more flexible than all those other form builders.
For the curious my 2 main queries (before taking the plunge) were around Views and field encryption.
Re Views, Mark said it is on his roadmap, but told me a simple workaround is to use Custom Post Types and the WS Form CPT add-on. No idea why that hadn’t occurred to me as it was pretty obvious in hindsight. A little more fiddly than FF Views, but worked a treat.
Re encryption – unlike most form builders, this feature is available out of the box in WS Form. But I actually had an edge case where I only wanted some fields encrypted, not everything. When I asked Mark if this was possible, an hour later, he replied saying that was now available! He’d built a couple of hooks to allow me to do what I needed!
Finally, the support is amazing. Any and every question/concern I have ever had is usually answered the same day. Just the other day I had a multisite licensing question which Mark just went and built into WS Form in just a few hours. Top drawer stuff.
Can’t recommend it enough.
EDIT: Just to be clear some of what I refer to needs the Pro license.
