An alternative to TDO Mini Forms?

I always thought if there was a decent alternative to my wordpress plugin TDO Mini Forms, that I would properly retire the plugin. Well it seems there may be: Gravity Forms. As it says on the website: “the WordPress form management plugin you’ve been waiting for”. The catch? You have to pay for it.

And for that reason I haven’t tried it so I can’t comment on in comparison to TDO Mini Forms, but certainly it looks more polished and contains all sorts of features I never added to TDO Mini Forms. Yet because you have to pay, you get access to proper support, something I’ve struggle to provide (as it’s simply not fun).

A number of commenters on my post about TDO Mini Forms hiatus suggested I should turn it into a paid plugin and that they’d be willing to pay for it. Well I think Gravity Forms have beaten me to the punch there, though I never had the drive to try and make money from TDO Mini Forms at all.

I did say:

…if you’re building a professional website using WordPress and require some special user interface that hides the backend UI, it’s great to mock something up with TDO Mini Forms. But I can’t help but think, it would be better to build your own custom version. TDO Mini Forms is incredibly flexible, but it can’t do everything. And the more complex it gets, the more bug prone it becomes and harder to support and… well it also suffers the fickleness of an author that isn’t under contract to support it long term either. Just saying, it’s not as I’m being paid.

Maybe Gravity Forms is your answer if that paragraph hits home.

Of course, the existence of Gravity Forms does allow me to think, perhaps, I could strip back a lot of the “advanced” features, such as image upload, and just make a simple decent post submit/edit form with moderation. Which is what it should have been all along, rather than the sprawling, monstrous, hacky mess of code and features it is now.

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