Recently we heard about the retirement of Caldera Forms and that this going to be replaced by Ninja Forms. Saturdrive the company behind caldera and ninja wrote the following:
CiviCRM, while not an official Caldera Forms add-on, enjoys widespread use and a pretty incredible community that showed up in force during our discovery process earlier this year. We’ll be working in conjunction with their team to make an official Ninja Forms <> CiviCRM integration to make your transition seamless and keep you connected to WordPress
Although this a nice appraisal of the CiviCRM community it also raises some questions for me. The sentence “We’ll be working in conjunction with their team…” does raise the question does a team exists on the civicrm side? I believe we are an open source community without a centralized organization so I don’t think a “their team” does exist. (Maybe it is the core team? Or is it Andrei?)
Also what does “official Ninja Forms <> CiviCRM integration” mean? Does this mean Saturdrive will develop something and will ask money fot it? (Which is fair if they develop it). Does this also mean they will make an integration with CiviCRM through CiviMcRestFace? And do they know all the use cases in which the caldera form is used? I don't believe so.
To me it looks like they are make promising without knowing how to deliver them and what they actual mean. So probably they have promised this as they want to keep the customers of caldera happy and satisfied and give them a smooth transition to Ninja.
For me personal I don't have any objections against their move of retiring caldera and putting their effort into the development and support of ninja. They have the full rights to do so!
However I am quite curious what this means for the civicrm integration within the wordpress ecosystem (whether civicrm is used in the same wordpress, or whether wordpress is used as a website connected to an external website).
Also I am quite curious what this means for the civicrm community and how we could collaborate on this together.
I would propose to have video call and discuss the retirement of the caldera forms.
Feel free to join if you are using Caldera or have developed civi/caldera. The topic of the video cal is basically a sort of mini-conference around caldera and civicrm.
When: Wednesday 7th April 3PM (CET) / 2PM (UK) / 9AM (New York) / 11PM (Sydney)
Location: https://jitsi.civicoop.org/caldera
More information: jaap.jansma@civicoop.org
Comments
I'll be there. We have clients using Caldera/CiviCRM and prospects inquiring about it. Thanks for organizing, Jaap.
Thanks Jaap for organizing. I'll join in.
Guillaume