And totally agree with the “magic” thing 9 out of 10 person dont want to understand the job but worship. So what a prophet effect

@Erwin…I’m using CodeIgniter on a couple of other projects, so I’ve got some experience there. This project was about trying out some new toys.

Let me try to clarify that statement. We’ve got a 7 person staff — all with some level of programming, but only 1 developer who’s full time job is to write server-side PHP/SQL code all day. I’m the UX Designer but I have lots of programming experience. While I can and occasionally do write some of the backend code, I try to focus on the front end.

We get lots of project requests on the order of this form (event registration forms, sign ups, etc). As you might expect. The dev guy is pretty fully booked on other, bigger, longer term projects, so the work falls to others to put together when they can. So one of the goals of our CMS/framework search is to have a tool that can generate these simple forms quickly, reducing or eliminating the need to allocate someone’s time to write PHP/SQL.

By scouring the interwebs for Freeform demos/examples, we finally did as @Hambo suggested. But it took a long time to get there. First, it was difficult for us to find useful Freeform docs. We found an example, but when it came time to customize for our form it was difficult to know what the freeform tags did exactly. Second, it took us a while to figure out that we had to create separate Freeform fields in a different place than the form template — the two seemed really far apart in the EE admin interface, and going back and forth in a trial/error manner wasn’t nice. Of course, there is a learning curve, but now I know how, and it still doesn’t seem that EE/Freeform provides the level of automated form building I was hoping for. Likewise, CodeIgniter would not help reduce the need for someone with PHP/SQL skills to build the form guts.

Contrast this with Drupal’s Webform, which gives you a GUI for building your form — all the form building, customizing, and analysis options are available in one place. Rails was also strong in this area…

Thanks for the discussion guys!

One thing I found odd in your article:”it requires a developer to build the form, which was a major downside for our team” yet you say your team works in “base PHP”… did I miss anything? I still have to meet the first client who could build his own form even with a so-called form builder.

Admittedly there could be more help for an absolute beginner but all you would need to do is build the form in HTML, add the Freeform tags top and bottom then make sure the names correspond with the form variables in Freeform.

Yes you do need to build a thank you page but this is EE’s strength. You can point it back to itself and use a conditional to check for an additional URL segment or point to a whole new template.

One thing to note is ExpressionEngine 2.0 will be built with CodeIgniter, itself a PHP framework, so you are free to build a form builder and release it as a module!

If you need any help going forward then just Twitter to hashtag #ee or #expressionengine or jump on the EE forums. We’ll all be happy to help.

I’d be curious to know the final results *after you see each build approach to its end*. Drupal may have been quick out of the gates, but it might actually take 4 people + 3 hours each to “get” the templating system. And while EE does require a certain way of thinking, you may soon encounter an “ah-hah” moment, or discover that theming in EE is a breeze – even easier than WordPress I’d argue.

Rails may win in the end, but you’d at least gain a more complete understanding of the tools at hand. A lot can happen in that last 20%…