Blue Flame Forms For Joomla 2.5
Also available for Joomla 1.5.x and Joomla 1.7.x for a limited period! You get access to all three versions in the download area!
Building on 8 years of success!
Dont take our word for it please! Go and play with the live hands on demo site where you can play with all the features yourself - for free!
One Click Demo - FREE - No signup needed:
http://demo.joomla-forms.com/administrator/
Joomla Forms brings together years of experience and the flexibility of new validation rules, new form previews, new submit actions, new integrations... Almost everything is possible!
* Save to database, export options, unlimited emails
* GPG Encryption built in for secure emails
* SSL Support - force forms to only be accepted over SSL
* UNLIMITED Form generation
* UNLIMITED Form Fields per form
* UNLIMITED Submit Actions per form
* UNLIMITED Form Submissions allowed (Or limit it if you want!)
* HOSTED ON YOUR SITE, and not our servers
* Integrated SPAM PROTECTION (Not Captcha!) transparent and configurable
* Integrated 3rd Party SPAM PROTECTION Plugins
* Compatible with all known SEF Extensions
* Compatible with Joomla 1.5.x AND Joomla 1.7.x AND Joomla 2.5.x
* Requires PHP5+
* Fully Supported! and FREE UPGRADES FOR LIFE
* No other developer has more experience in Form Extensions then Phil Taylor, his first Form component (Phil-A-Form) was the first ever Joomla Forms extension ever created.
* Developed by a Zend PHP5 Certificated Developer !!!
Stop reading this now and go and play with the demo yourself - you will not be disappointed!!!
http://www.forms-for-joomla.com/demo
I'm now very happy that a new version for 1.7 is released (for a long time it seemed to be finished with 1.5).
Where it fails miserably is the support. When I submitted a support ticket on Nov 1st I had an autoreply explaining that we would have an answer within 24 hours. We had no reply at all and on Nov 4th Phil kindly closed the ticket without answering the question! Further, the category this ticket was posted in has now been removed so only a J!1.7 category exists.
We expect good support for paid extensions. and this just isn't good enough.
Well you could not be further from the truth. You will find that I, the developer, have been involved with Joomla Framework since its very creation and that bfForms extends the Joomla framework to achieve its goals.
The support forum is open for business, Its viewable by anyone so we can be judged by that - anyone can visit and see our replies at http://support.phil-taylor.com - I aim to personally reply to all queries within 24 hours, but I have a life too, I get to them as quick as I can on a triage basis (Site outages get priority, questions or niggles get lower pri).
We pruned the Joomla Forms for Joomla 1.5.x category from our support forum after over six months of emails to customers and a blog post informing of that decision. Unfortunately your post at http://support.phil-taylor.com/discussions/bfforms-support-forum/1420-unable-to-open-paused-form was also closed in error at that time. Your query was relating to a bug in earlier versions of bfForms and had already been resolved at the time of your query - pointing to the fact that you were not running the latest version. Please upgrade to the latest version and you will see that this bug is resolved.
If you had approached us before your negative review we would have seen that your thread was closed in error and provided you all the support we could to resolve your issue - as you did not escalate the issue we could not respond to your concerns!!!!
So overall, good component and especially so if you don't worry about what is going on under the hood.
I had been using another vendors form extension but wanted the option to allow a user to pause and return later to complete a form. BFForms advertised that it was capable of that and demo site that is setup for allows for that option. The demo was easy to use and I was able to quickly create a form that I could "pause" and complete later. All seemed well until I tried it on my site. The pause feature did not work for me.
As far as ease of use the extension worked ok, and was fairly easy to use. My problem is that is does not do (at least for me) what it had been advertised to do (I recall reading the pause feature on the feature list - it is now no longer listed as a feature). I posted my problem to the support forum on 2/16/11 (http://support.phil-taylor.com/discussions/bfforms-support-forum/1002-pause-not-working) and though I admit I messed up the login credentials I initially sent for my site and told the developer that it was low priority, I still do not have a resolution to the problem (today is 5/17/11).
If the software did what it was advertised to do when I bought and my support experience was better, I would give this a higher rating. I find the support to be lacking. Sorry.
I did had an installation problem, which I reported ... it actually turned out to be a bug in a commercial template. Within a day, Phil had found and fixed the bug ... even though it wasn't a bfFroms issue.
I have used this over a number of years now, only to uninstall it a couple of weeks down the line as it consumes way too much memory. Subsequent upgrades have not addressed the large footprint this package creates.
This review is factually incorrect. bfForms when installed in Joomla in the normal way does not consume any more memory than a normal PHP app does, and still fits WELL within the default PHP memory limit of 8M.
Great features and flexibility.
Thanks for the videos and troubleshooting tips for installation.
This app has saved my days work of effort in coding.
Keep up the good work =)
Folks are all too ready to complain, but slow with praise. So from me Phil. Well done, thanks and keep up the good work. Don't let em grind you down.
Would be a great plugin if there was better direct support from Phil.
***No where on our site (http://www.forms-for-joomla.com) have we EVER said, implied or stated that bfForms has been designed to be integrated to JoomFish!***
You started a forum thread here: http://bit.ly/gcLZ34 YOU ASSUMED the problem was related with joomfish but did not wait for my reply. You state you wanted "better support from Phil" however you received a reply from Nick and a personal reply from my.
I **clearly** stated the problem was not with a conflict with joomFish and directed you to SEARCH the forum where I had already provided the solution MANY MANY times. If you had searched the forum you would have seen this.
I'm sorry you felt you had to give a negative "review" however the facts are clear:
1) You ASSUMED what the problem was incorrectly
2) You RECEIVED SUPPORT form TWO members of out team
3) The solution to your problem has been fixed, and could be found in the forum, and has NOTHING to do with joomFish.
4) bfForms doesnt contain ANY code that invokes joomFish extension at all!
Bfforms also come fully integrated with IxEdit; a powerful java applet that makes form interactivity as easy as point-n-click. Be forewarned however: the IxEdit developer mode tends to break forms if you're running other JQuery applets on the page you're editing - make sure you turn these off before going into developer mode or you may end up having to recreate your form from scratch! This is IxEdit's incompatibility though, and unrelated to bfforms. Once the code is inserted into the page - you can re-enable other scripts fine.
Bfforms also allows you to write custom PHP scripts for forms, which is huge for me. The only con - or perhaps obvious thing - is that if you're doing any kind of mysql insertion, with custom PHP you *must* use your own anti-injection techniques; which is a non-issue for experienced coders.
My only issue with bfforms is the lack of custom error messages/events. For example: I want a form to only be accessible to registered users and instead of the default "Access Level Above yours, are you logged in?!" I wanted to just go to a registration form. This doesn't seem possible, and is very irritating. Because of this, I can't give it the top score, but don't let that keep you away.
For your information: it turned out that bfForms installed an instance of jQuery alongside the instance I installed myself. Both instances had a conflict.
The "HTML Field Name" is changed by the component whenever other changes are made in the General field. This means that you have to keep changing it back.
It is not possible to include plain text in the middle of a form unless you use the Smarty templates. However, these cannot handle square brackets so if that is required in the form field, you do not have any control over the layout.
And, if you do have to raise questions be prepared for unhelpful and almost rude replies from Phil Taylor.
It is a nice concept but poorly executed and this is reflected in the very poor level of customer service.
Thanks for the review, but let me put you straight on a few things:
1) There is no issue with the HTML Field name reverting -I have tested this in the latest version and can find no bug. (The JED Review terms state you should not report bugs in reviews also!)
2) You can EASILY add any html you like in the middle of the form by using the HTML Form Element within bfForms, you do not need to use a custom layout or Smarty Syntax. Smarty also allows the use of {literal} tags and so you CAN use square brackets in Smarty syntax and you DO have full control over the layout. I'm sorry that your smarty experience never enabled you to use this feature of smarty
All support is provided in public (unless requested by the customer) at http://support.phil-taylor.com please feel free to view the forum threads to see that support is given.
I met some problems on the installing part, and I got full support at once.
If you need an extension for form fields, I recommend buying this one.
Thank you very much especially to Nick, for your patience with me and your great and fast support!
Question (Cannot see a 'contact us anywhere') and a question I think a lot would like to know..
Does the component handle 'cascading dropdowns'?
eg: Country - database link
State - Cascading dropdown (Watches 'Country')
Region - Cascading dropdown (Watches 'State')
... etc.
If the answer is yes, I will scoop it up now and so will hundreds of others!
Good work.
There is a "Contact" button on every page of every site we own :-)
You can receive support from us at any time using our support forum:
http://support.phil-taylor.com/
I tried several non-commercial and 2 commercial form creation component, this one by Far is the Easiest, most reliable, and huge amount of security and spam protection...the customer service is second to none, Value for the Money is outstanding...
I am not a programmer, nor an expert in joomla, and was able to create 10 forms while having my morning coffee...Hats Off to Phil.
If you are looking for a reliable, secure, easy to use, and highly configurable form then bfForms is the go.
I'm continually surprised at how many hidden features are in there, they have thought of everything!
Most importantly though the support is amazing!