The ONLY forms plugin you will ever need! Long and comprehensive review.

For years I had my eye on WS Form as I had discovered it as the one capable of doing multi-step forms in an easy way and I had heard so many great things about it. Little did I know that most of what I knew and had heard were all understatements.

This year when a real need arose, motivating a price tag on a forms’ plugin, I deepened my exploration and found a demo video, where Mark, the developer of the plugin (and such a nice person), demonstrated the features to a WordPress Youtuber. In just one video my 5-7 pre-purchase questions got answered – imagine, just a single video! (So check it out! Search on Youtube for ”WP Builds, Form building basics – WS Form Webinar Series, Episode 1”) And Mark was not even done there, there was more to get, since there are more episodes with the same Youtuber.

This plugin covers EVERYTHING. Going through the knowledge base is like a universe of everything form-related and you are able to find every use case that you could ever think of or imagine as a user. My first impression was as if someone decided to make The Only and Best  Form Plugin of All Time and went through each and every scenario any user could ever think of, and went ahead and implemented that.

I have found myself going quickly from advanced implementations to even more advanced implementations. An example is to go from creating a multi-step form in a grid layout in seconds to creating a form that is located on two different web pages, where the first form passes the values to the second form, and then goes on to

• save the form submissions (no need for an extra plugin for that), 
• sends an email with the form values, 
• redirects the user to a different page AND 
• inserts the results into a mailing list of my chosen email provider Brevo that complies with GDPR. 

Put that in stark contrast when working with other forms, where in the same amount of time, I go from figuring out how to include certain fields or not, and then how to start styling the fields into a grid. 

With the built-in grid system of 12 columns the layout of the form is done in seconds so that you can move on to real information gathering problems and not spend time getting stuck with the basics. Unfortunately getting stuck with the basics encourages you to settle for less of a result when you spend so much energy and struggle just to accomplish the basics. With this plugin you are able to go much further and complete ALL of your requirements for information collection. 

For me the next step in the future means to be able to enable users to input data on the frontend to create new articles of the type I made myself with the help of Pods, which I used to create custom post types. All of this running neatly in Oxygen, my page builder of choice for the current project.

Going back to what I mentioned of this plugin covering all possible use cases, it does not stop there, because more than half of the value of the plugin lies in the extensive and comprehensive universe which is the Knowledge Base. Clearly there is a lot of hard work put into that, since it is better than all plugin documentation I have encountered, being as detailed as the WP Codex, but much clearer to understand. 

Most of the time when I email support and Mark himself (!) responds, he just needs to point me to a knowledge base article, because all of my questions have found their answer there. It is indeed a nice touch to have Mark himself respond with a short orientation to frame the answer and then get a pointer to an article to find the remaining practical details of the answer.

Considering all of the above, when I discovered that there is an affordable single-site license there was no need to even think whether to get the Pro version or not, because there is so much value packed into the license already! For anyone, literally anyone, with any need for anything more than a simple contact form, this plugin ~IS~ the forms plugin that you need, because it will cover any specific scenario or need you may ever have. 

There can be only one, and THIS is the one!

• This topic was modified 2 months, 1 week ago by rdcsg.