The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

As a long time user of FacileForms who has sunken quite literally months into learning to drive the finnicky thing and developing forms for several websites over the last year, I was quite literally gutted when I read the news that Peter Koch is not going to update it for Joomla 1.5.

I imagine there are many of you here in the same boat as me over that policy decision and also have a wide range of emotions over the news, and that like me you have been scrambling to test out all the other form management packages which are ready for Joomla 1.5 with the same deep disappointment and frustration that I have this last month.

Well I hope you all are as fortunate as I was today to stumble upon this ray of sunshine they call RSform.

I don't know how I managed to overlook this wee gem since I migrated to Joomla 1.5. Perhaps I just skipped on past when I saw the word "Commercial"? And maybe today I was just so at the end of my tether I was finally ready to fork out some dollars in the slim hope it would be able to do something better than the other Joomla 1.5 form managers on offer.

But whatever, I am very glad that RSform finally registered on my radar and after spending most of my day fiddling with the trial version I am genuinely surprised at how quickly I was able to reassemble some of my old Joomla 1.x FacileForms forms into this new format because RSforms has some very easily accessible features that are way too difficult for the average newbie user to master in FacileForms.

And although there are some features I will sadly miss from FacileForms such as the way it lays out form elements, I am pretty hopeful, after observing how energetic and encouraging their support forums are, that the RSforms developers would be very open minded to including some other missing things like multi-page forms in their future builds.

It's just a shame that the component form structures are so different that a conversion utility from FacileForms would be very very unlikely. But on the other hand, I suspect my extra time spent mastering RSform to the same standard will be a much more secure investment with regard to future-proofing.

A very promising development project indeed for those of us who finally took the plunge to Joomla 1.5.

I've just switched to Joomla 1.5 and working hard to get my head around the new templating system so I can make my own from scratch. This wonderful tool is going to save me so much time I am doing a happy dance after taking it for a test drive.

I haven't given it the full rating yet because there is one small thing (not sure if it is a bug or a feature) where the templateDetails.xml has generated some module positions that are not present in my index.php file and missed two custom positions I coded into it.

I would be interested to know how it generates module positions, does it scan the index.php file and extract them from there? Or does it just insert a generic list of default positions from the Joomla core template system? If it could be made (or fixed, if this is a bug rather than a feature) to generate only those present in the index.php then it would get my 5-star rating.

Also, I am just curious to know where the blank list of CSS styles is generated from? Do you use the list from a known Joomla template or template designer (eg: Barrie North's J1.5 templating tutorial sample CSS) or is this your own list? It would be a very interesting possibility for a new feature if we were able to create our own CSS master code, or even import one from a known "sample template".

The downside of that idea of course would be that the application would loose its standalone portability, by needing to have an app directory to save custom user CSS templates. But, being the huge lover of portable apps that I am, I'm not sure if sacrificing the standalone nature of the .exe would be worth an additional user feature. Hrmmmmm.

I hope word gets out around the Joomla communities that such a brilliant concept-of-a-tool exists and you get the credit you deserve for developing this for our use. Good luck in your future developments.

Cheers!
Zana