Building Form Builder

With generous support from the community funding our first Form Builder Make-it-happen campaign, Tim Otten & Coleman Watts have begun regular code sprints for phase 1 of the Form Builder project. The extension is evolving rapidly, but I wanted to take a break from development for a few minutes to update you on what we've accomplished so far and where we go from here.

We now have a data model that can support the complex needs of CRM forms - multiple contacts, relationships, and repeatable entities (e.g. enter 1 or more children for a family, and 1 or more email address & phone number for the parents). We've developed the concept of "field blocks" which are configurable groups of fields that all function together (e.g. a Name block which handles first, middle, last name, prefix, suffix and title). And we have a prototype framework to render and process those forms. A lot of work has gone into API v4 which serves as the backend processor for storing forms, populating them with data and processing form submissions.

What's next for Form Builder?

We've mocked up a drag-n-drop interface for building complex forms and will be building that over the next few weeks.

You can follow along with development by watching the Afform project on Github and we are usually around on chat.civicrm.org as well.

Form Builder is a big effort and requires community support. We've spun up a Make It Happen campaign to empower community members to get involved and support the project.