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.
Why not offer TDO Mini Forms for free but with paid support? This ultimately coincides very strongly with the GPL and means that if someone is to get the kind of support you normally find very time consuming to provide you then get paid for it.
The problem with Gravity Forms is that a user has that initial barrier of having to pay for the code from the outset. This allows you to differentiate TDO Mini Forms from Gravity sufficiently.
Mark,
My brother and I love your TDO Mini Forms project and use it for our art media project. Although it doesn’t do everything that we want it to, Gravity Forms doesn’t do it either.
Also, we do use the image upload.
My brother used to offer a freeware software product, and after hundreds of thousands of downloads decided to start selling it. He made $7K a month for a very long time. You might be surprised at the money you could make if you go commercial.
Mark, as slick as it looks, the features does not include custom post types or custom taxonomies right now.
I don’t mean to be rude but if you look at the code in firebug when trying the AJAX implementation, you can tell it’s done just plain wrong as the POSTS don’t even appear in console. Furthermore, the spinner continues to spin in firefox. AJAX submissions don’t even take advantage of the callbacks, which ultimately led to me ditching the use of gravity forms for the project I had intended.
If it wasn’t for the poor portability of cforms ii (read: you have to adjust hardcoded paths when pushing to production), I’d go as far to say it’s better than Gravity forms.
My gripes with cforms are poor default themes, forced copyrights in email footers (looks tacky), questionably hacky code and it’s not in the repository for previous failure to meet terms of the GPL.
Anyway, I’m questioning my purchase of Gravity Forms, I urge others to buy a one site license to start (and google for coupon codes) if they decide to use it. Until the kinks are worked out, the documentation (that you can’t see until you buy a license) is improved and AJAX is implemented more professional (come on guys, jQuery is integrated into WordPress) I’ll be using cforms / contact forms 7 / TDO forms or writing custom plugins depending on the issue at hand.
Hi Mark!
The custom work and paid support might be an idea.
I have not played enough with Gravity Forms to see that is can be that flexible. I like you can keep form submissions (contact form) in the backend. However I have not tried to set it up like I have with TDO mini forms as a simple social bookmark site. After Jean Baptiste did WPVote, I had to figure it out for myself and did it.
I think TDO forms has a lot of potential to expand. You could try a premium version.
Have you considered making the core functionality of TDO miniforms all the main plugin does, and then release everything you strip out of the plugin into add on plugins?
This way, if you, or others add complex features to TDO, you can simply host an add on plugin, but you won’t have to SUPPORT the complex code.
This allows you to make a clean simple Control panel, and supportable, bug free plug in. This way you can have what you want while still giving the users the ability to do more.
As for Gravity forms. Your plugin is awesome. Don’t sell yourself short just because someone else makes a plugin.
Also, while Gravity Forms charges for SUPPORT to their plug in (which you should for yours as well) the plug in itself is GPL software. Which means there’s no reason you can’t distribute both their plug in and TDO mini-forms.
You could even direct everyone looking for support to purchase support from Gravity forms using their affiliate program.
I definitely support TDO over other forms plugin
I really appreciate the support for GeoMashup plugin (which other form plugins do not support AFAIK)
please don’t make TDO mini forms die, maybe this could become a canonical WP3 plugin or could be adopted/sponsored by the community?
it’s one of the best features for WP as CMS and since the guys at Automattic as well as the community would really like to see WP turning into a widely used CMS, the functionalities provided by TDO would be essential to bring WP to such level
my 2c
I know the answer is probably know but is there any chance of getting TDO Mini Forms to work friendly along side the wpDirAuth LDAP plugin?
As it stands, when you activate TDO Mini Forms, it overrides the LDAP plugin and prevents LDAP authentication (by nature of preventing the LDAP plugin from managing the Sign-in process).
Thoughts?
Thanks!
How does it prevent the sign-in process? TDOMF should be interfering with login/sign-in.
http://thedeadone.net/forum/?p=3440
Hello,
I help run a large blog, and we were wanting to use TDO Mini Forms, but it almost crashed our website…thankfully it didn’t as the server is quite powerful and just about handled it. I am only commenting as am hoping you can steer me in the right directions of use before I consider an alternative.
When I say it almost crashed our blog, it was because, even when just active in our plugins list, TDO Mini Form caused 30 extra queries on the database, even if a post wasn’t using any of the features. With thousands of visitors on an hourly basis, this caused MySQL to run REALLY slow.
Is this the normal behaviour of the plugin, in that even when not being used, it causes so much overhead?
Thanks for any help, as I have heard good things about this plugin.
Colin
@Bryan C. I’m not sure I can help further. TDO-Mini-forms does not over-ride wp_authenticate or wp_setcookie, so I don’t know why your LDAP plug in is complaining. It does over ride wp_notify_postauthor but you can safely comment that out as a test.
@Colin Wiseman I haven’t done any quantive or performance analysis of TDO-Mini-forms SQL queries. I didn’t really optimise that part of the code so it could well be that many queries.
I don’t want to go into reasons already mentioned in previous blog posts but I haven’t the time or resources to do such work. I’d imagine re-engineering the way TDOMF does SQL queries would be a big effort.
While it’s great that you used my plugin, my feeling is that if you have such a large popular website that you create a custom/specific solution. TDOMF is a bit of kitchen sink, but it ends up being able to do lots of things, but nothing (IMHO) amazingly.
Thanks for the quick response. Yeah unfortunately large and popular didn’t mean lots of funds to build things
Thanks for the plugin anyways.
Hi… I just want to say that I’m loving your widjet TDO Mini forms… Go on with the good work
Bye
Paulo Gomes
(Portugal)
Keep going on..Tdo forms is best. if you make it premium i will be very pleased to buy.
Hi there,
I really loved your plugin and hope God Always Bless You for this free plugin.
I’ve just installed your plugin to my website, but I still confused about the content field. When I tried to submit something through my website, the text that typed run over the line on the right. This looks doubt, not like when I wrote this comment in the box which when text has almost touched the far right line, will automatically fall into a new line.
Please let me know for this case.
Very thank you for your response.
Do you think it is possible to create a form where a (newly) registered user can fill out a custom page template and submit it
If possible how would i do this
Keep it going! I will pay.
Hi,
I really think you should further develop TDO Mini Form. Its such a nice and wonderful plugin. The best feature that I liked is the moderation and approval system.
I would be willing to support and pay for this plugin just in case if you decide to come up with a paid version of this plugin.
Please don’t retire this plugin, keep going and I am sure you will get good response.
Regards,
Alok
I think you should completely rewrite TDO from the ground up so that, instead of it being a post submission plugin, it could instead write a script that would put an RSS Feed icon on the moon. Then, when people were outside at night, they could reach up and double click the moon with their fingers and it would cause an RSS Feed of all the latest most awesomest stuff online to scroll across the northern hemisphere’s sky. I don’t have anything against the southern hemisphere, but I think it would take a lot of extra code to get it to work in two hemispheres without a giant mirror or maybe a satellite with a big prism on the end of it.
Or not, either way.
Just to say keep the good work, and i think the idea someone gave here to have paid support is a really good one, you should consider that.
Thanks from Portugal =)
According to me would be better just paid support and free donation. Please don’t turn it to paid plugin. It’ll kill plugin in many ways. Just for example Gravity… I never tried it because i am not willing pay for “something” i dont know.
Main feature I really like on TDO is submiting form as post. I didn’t find any better plugin for this purpouse.
Gravity Forms may have nice look. But my vote is for TDO Mini Forms.
If it started it’s service directly with ‘ Paid ‘ Service and got such a popularity. TDO Mini Forms have more chances to steal the User hearts .
Many WordPress users including me would be happier if you add update the plugin with more features eventually. There is nothing wrong if you charge an amount for advanced features.
TDO Mini Forms made possible which we think impossible , so we can pay what ever you deserve
Will be waiting for your next version
I really love TDO Mini Forms, but there is one more form called FormidablePro which comes very close to TDO. Like yours it has submission moderation and post edit features along with customization options. Again its not free but miles ahead of gravity forms.
But that should not stop you from updating TDO mini forms and keeping it running.
like this plugin
thank uuuuuuu