Plugin of the Week: Form Maker- Innovative Form Builder

With over 1500 form building plugins in the WordPress repository, each with its own arsenal of add-ons, creating beautiful forms has never been easier. From registration, order and reservation to feedback, contact and survey forms, the options offered by form builders for customization are many and varied.

So what sets the Form Maker plugin apart from the rest?

Well, for one, it is a form builder plugin that’s well-equipped, economical and completely responsive to boot. A freemium plugin, it lets you create multiple forms quickly and easily.

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Form Maker Plugin Features

The plugin is packed with features, to help with form creation. Here’s a look at some prominent features.

Drag and Drop Builder

The user interface of Form Maker is very straightforward and clean. With a drag-and-drop form builder that lets users add various fields easily. Also, once you have added all the form fields required, you can move, edit or remove them from the main form window itself.

Customizable Form Fields

The free version is limited to the addition of seven form fields when creating a form while the premium versions do not have any such specifications. There are 12 form fields, each with various parameters that can be customized to create a unique form.

The Name, Address, E-Mail, Number and Phone form fields can be edited to have various sectional lengths. The Time and Date form fields can be numerical entry type or using a datepicker. Single and multiple choice questions can be added using the respective form fields.

Hidden and conditional fields can be added that only appear when other, previously specified conditions are met. Also, the forms can have page breaks and columns for pagination, making the form responsive to different screen formats.

Various Themes

There are 41 different themes available for form creation and you can create your own besides. Customizing the button styles, font colors and backgrounds is also possible which gives you a lot of options to kick around and choose from.

Flexible Layout

Form Maker has 9 ready form templates for Contact, Registration, Order, Evaluation and Survey forms. You can either extrapolate from these or build your own from scratch. There is no limitation to the number of forms you build.

Easy Backend Management

Managing forms at the backend is pretty easy with the Form Manager having a chronological list of all the existing and newly created forms. You can look up any particular form you want using the search field so scrolling through long lists is avoided. Note that forms cannot be edited in the Manager itself. You need to navigate to the form page to effect any changes desired.

The Submissions section maintains a categorized database of all information submitted by users for each form. You can block or unblock customer IP addresses from here too. This data can be exported in CSV and XML formats and used for advanced analysis.

Text Areas and File Uploads

Form Maker lets you add pre-filled text-boxes to your WordPress forms. These can be used for giving any specific instructions necessary for front-end users while filling the form. File uploads can be enabled, like signature, photo fields for Registration forms with a pre-specified upload limit.

Multi-Language Support

Form Maker supports 47 languages currently, including simplified Chinese and Japanese scripts. This makes your form localization ready across the globe. Besides, Form Maker support offers translations for any language required other than these.

Resume Form

Unlike some form builder plugins, Form Maker lets you save changes and begin working with the form where you left from. Form Drafts are not maintained separately though and have to be accessed from the Manager itself. Form Maker allows you to re-direct users to posts, pages or other URL’s on submission of the form.

Custom CSS and JavaScript

Apart from the drag and drop builder, developers can incorporate additional JavaScript codes into the existing form outline or change the CSS therein.

Google Maps API Integration

Form Maker integrates with Google Maps for the Add your Address on a Map field. This lets front-end users mark their location on the Google Maps interface instead of typing it in.

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This functionality can be extended to displaying two maps in two different form fields in the Pro version.

Form Maker has 12 additional add-ons to extend plugin functionality. Each of these starts from $15 per add-on, per site. The combined pricing plan is more economical though.

Some of the add-ons are:

• Conditional Mailing to send emails to specific users based on the submitted information
• MailChimp Integration to leverage the features of the professional marketing plugin
• The Export/Import add-on lets you selectively export data, like specific fields or time periods for example, from form submissions for a more targeted analysis
• Form Maker Pushover lets you receive push messages in real time, whenever any new form submission is made on your site. This can be used to integrate with mobile devices too
• The Calculator add-on helps you execute simple mathematical calculations dynamically. The final cost column has to be made
• Read-Only so that users are not able to change the auto-generated value

Form Maker also supports Google Drive, Dropbox and Stripe integrations.

The Premium versions of the plugin begin with half-yearly licenses for single sites and yearly for multiple sites. The additional features here are support for add-ons, unlimited form fields, variable extensions for the file upload option, complete Google Maps API integration and PayPal with optional percentage tax addition on payments is possible.

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Conclusion

Customer feedback is one of the best ways of getting a genuine review of how well your website is doing, in terms of service efficiency and customer satisfaction. This is useful is determining analytically what your site (and your company, by extension) is doing right and what it is not.

Form Maker helps you create spartan, minimalistic forms, detailed, elaborate forms and everything in between, effortlessly. With so many form building plugins out there, having practically the same features all around, cost becomes the deciding factor while choosing the plugin. This is where Form Maker trumps over Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms, though each of them have some additional functionality than the former.

In terms of ease-of-use, Form Maker has a much simpler user interface and way more features than Contact Form 7, though the latter is revered by many.

With plentiful features at an economical cost, Form Maker is one of the best form creation plugins on WordPress. What do you think?

Comment and let us know!