Summary of the video con about the future of Caldera Forms.

Today we had our video con about caldera forms. (See announcement) and this blog is a summary of our conversation.

Thanks everybody who joined. I liked the fact that we had various ideas and opinions on how to proceed. This shows for me how diverse our community is and I do love that!

At the moment there is no real urgent issue with the end of life of caldera forms at the end of this year.

We discussed which alternatives there are going to be in the long term:

• Afform / Form Builder the CiviCRM core team has worked on the afform and form builder which right now can build forms and they can be included in WordPress with a short code. However they are not completely feature rich as caldera is right now.
  The option of a remote WordPress site connected to CiviCRM does not work (but could in theory).
• Gravity form we have briefly touched on gravity forms but haven't discussed that in depth as there was only person in the room who had experience with gravity forms and who was also looking into alternatives
• Ninja Forms we have also discussed ninja forms and the integration with CiviCRM. This is something saturdrive (the company behind caldera and ninja) promised to develop and there are some contacts between them and people in our community.
• Creating a community maintained version of Caldera this could be as an intermediate solution (after end of this year) but for the long term could be heavily burden on the shoulders of the community. This is probably also needed as some end user organizations have created quite complex forms with caldera which are not going to be easily replaced.
• InlayFP from a presentation of Jon Goldberg where he showed different alternatives to create forms in CiviCRM (each with its pro's and cons) and the solution he needed which was InlayFP.

We concluded that it might be wise to try to collaborate on one of the alternatives as a community in such a way that we don't want to end up with too many variations of the same sort of plugin, which almost do the same thing but none of them being as feature rich as caldera. At the same time we are a decentralized community and that is our strength.

We also concluded that it might be wise for Saturdrive to include our community with their development efforts. Some of us seem to be on speaking terms with them.

And lastly we concluded to have another video call in two months time, to see where things are and what direction things are moving.

ps. We have recorded our video call and ask me if you want to have a link to the video.