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Author Topic: Advanced form building for CiviCRM  (Read 1193 times)

SarahG (FountainTribe)

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Advanced form building for CiviCRM
December 06, 2015, 03:43:09 am
I would like to know what people's thoughts/plans are regarding to best direction for advanced form building for CiviCRM.  The only native CiviCRM form-building option is CiviCRM Profiles, but profiles are very limited when it comes to situations with multiple contacts, multiple events, etc.   

When discussing this issue in the past, the usual answer is use the Drupal module WebForm (https://www.drupal.org/project/webform)  with Coleman's fantastic module "webform_civicrm" ( https://civicrm.org/extensions/webform-civicrm-integration ).  Of course this answer does not help people using CiviCRM under WordPress, Joomla or stand-alone.

The problem is there is currently no lead developer/sponsor working on porting Drupal WebForm to Drupal8. They are currently looking for a substantial sponsorship ( see details at: https://www.drupal.org/node/2603724)

This raises the question is what direction should the CiviCRM community focus on? I see some of the following options:

a) Help sponsor the Drupal8 port for WebForm, and also invest time in porting the module webform_civicrm to Drupal8 as well.

b) Integrate CiviCRM with the "Eform" module that already works in Drupal8, ie https://www.drupal.org/project/eform  (EForm is the new name for the EntityForm module for Drupal7)  If CiviCRM things are made available as Drupal entities (https://www.drupal.org/project/civicrm_entity) , this approach may be easier to maintain.

c) Invest in improving native CiviCRM form building capabilities, to eliminate any need for CMS-specific form building modules. 

Thoughts? Ideas?



« Last Edit: December 06, 2015, 03:52:32 am by SarahG »
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totten

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Re: Advanced form building for CiviCRM
December 18, 2015, 03:24:03 pm
A few thoughts:

a) I've been chatting with jenlampton and quicksketch (who manage the Backdrop and Webform projects). You can find some backstory on Backdrop at http://www.jenlampton.com/blog/introducing-backdrop-cms-drupal-fork . In any event, they're pretty keen to get Civi working on Backdrop, and we're hoping that they'll guest-blog about it in January. Given the details involved (e.g. porting D7=>Backdrop is easier than porting D7=>D8), and maybe if give some encouragement/support, we might see webform_civicrm on Backdrop before D8.

b) I don't know anyone who's working on eform integration, but it would probably be a big benefit for folks on D8. If someone is interested, I'd suggest coming to https://civicrm.org/blogs/colemanw/sprint-for-civi-drupal8-backdrop-wp-jan-30-to-feb-4 . That's kind of an impromptu thing, but I'm sure we could give some support from the Civi side of things.

c) We do need to improve Civi's native form system -- regardless of what integrations are there. The code in Civi's core forms has grown pretty hard to maintain (both for the core/official distribution and for downstream customizations), and it's easier to provide documentation, support, and polished behavior when we can use the same tools on each CMS. My hope is that we can incrementally produce some extensions for Civi v4.7.x that override many of the forms in civicrm-core -- and, when those are mature, mark them as Civi v5.0.

Coleman Watts

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Re: Advanced form building for CiviCRM
December 21, 2015, 07:38:11 am
Also note that someone has stepped up to do the D8 port of the Webform module. Here's hoping that pans out...
Try asking your question on the new CiviCRM help site.

jonathanjfshaw

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Re: Advanced form building for CiviCRM
December 29, 2015, 07:54:39 am
Contact forms seem to be making a resurgence in D8 as fieldable, storable all-purpose forms. Acquia for example recently funded an extension of the contact_storage module, instead of funding the porting of Webform. So it's a 3-horse race between webform, eform and contact forms to be the goto choice for D8 form building.

Declarative forms are an interesting approach, seeking to provide a high level of form customisation without complex custom coding, but without the developer work of creating a very sophisticated formbuilding UI. Might be a realistic direction for civiCRM to go in.

Some overview of the idea is here:
http://atendesigngroup.com/blog/declarative-programming-and-drupal
and some thoughts on an Angular approach here:
http://www.gizra.com/content/headless-drupal-form-api-drupal9/

YAMLform is a new Drupal module piloting this approach:
http://cgit.drupalcode.org/yamlform/tree/README.md
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