

Show HN: A New Category of Web Forms - nish1500
http://ncrafts.net/plugins/formcraft_wordpress_plugin/wordpress/?page_id=2

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nobodysfool
I tried every day in August before realizing that no date in August would
work. An 'x' or something or changing the icon to a cancel icon might have
worked better. Also the calendar icon did absolutely nothing when clicking on
it. Same thing with the email icon.

Sliders for inputting numbers? As my only option for inputting numbers? No
thanks!

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nish1500
Yes, disabling dates would be better. The current form uses conditional laws
to show / hide fields based on the date. So, this allows me to show field set
A when dates in July are selected, and field set B when dates in August are
selected, and field set C when any other date is selected.

Sliders are just one of the ways of inputting numbers. You can have a text
field that only accepts numbers.

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DevoAKA
A couple things I noticed:

\- Validation is very slow. It was averaging out to about 5s per submission.
This should be able to be done almost instantly on the front-end.

\- The email input is validated with the type="email" HTML5 attribute. If you
write something that doesn't pass, the notification appears (about) 400px
above the form. If you write something that does pass, technically, such as
"abc@abc", it is returned, by FormCraft, as invalid.

\- It would be nice if the input button was clickable, although I can see that
this would be more of a Bootstrap thing.

\- I'm not sure how I feel about that Budget sliders reading "0-0" and, once
clicked on, reading completely different numbers. If there is a minimum, why
not show it?

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wusatiuk
is there any way bugs can be reported in a structured way? would be really
helpful to further push this plugin, as the idea is awesome!

~~~
nish1500
Thanks! I am thoroughly reading through all the comments. You can also shoot
me an email nish [at] ncrafts.net

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julien421
FYI when I click on "Try the form builder" I get a 500 internal server error

    
    
      Internal Server Error
      
      The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
    
      Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@ncrafts.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
    
      More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
    
      Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
      Apache Server at ncrafts.net Port 80

~~~
nish1500
The links okay. It's the heavy traffic from HN. Never dreamt of it. Please
refresh.

~~~
julien421
It works! Tx! :)

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computer
There's no fallback for browsers that do not support javascript or have it
disabled. That's annoying for users of special devices, NoScript, but likely
also people who are blind and use screenreaders, for example.

Accessibility deserves _at least_ to be an afterthought.

~~~
nish1500
Taking away JavaScript will render 99% of the features useless. Right now I'm
working alone on this, part-time. When I have the resources and time, will
consider it :)

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peter-fogg
I've got a bit of a gripe with the "Job Application" form. Asynchronous saves
aren't really intuitive to a lot of users -- if you're a web developer who
understands AJAX (and the fact that there's a server with a database actually
storing the data somewhere), then it makes sense. But if you're an average
person who doesn't immediately know the mechanism it can be confusing. At work
I recently converted a portion of our UI from this style of saving to an
explicit model specifically to avoid this problem.

~~~
nish1500
Agreed. It might create confusion. It's better to have a simple direction in
the form that says, "Hey, your form is being saved as you type. You can always
come back and fill up the rest!"

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hexasquid
How about indicating that a day is not available before I click on it?

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kaptk3
Wish something like this existed standalone. Not tied to wordpress.

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themodelplumber
Me too. I use Machform and love that it's not tied to WordPress, because I use
ProcessWire most of the time. WordPress...sigh

~~~
nish1500
I am working on a hosted, cross-platform version with tons more features :)

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acoyfellow
Very cool. I like how it works, but I'd love to know how it converted compared
to other types of forms. Simply some A/B testing would do the trick, no?

It reminds me of the credit card form someone posted here, and the discussion
that followed.

~~~
nish1500
What a co-incidence! I was working on an A/B test to compare these forms with
forms made with other form builders. Will set it up in a day or two.

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apedley
Great concept. One issue with the dynamically appearing forms is you don't
know how long they will go on for. This will lead to people abandoning the
form even though they may be 1 step away from completion.

~~~
nish1500
At every step, you can always have text like 'Q 1 of 5'

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Kiro
Doesn't work on my smartphone (Android stock browser).

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at-fates-hands
This is odd considering the site is actually responsive. Something for the bug
tracker I suppose.

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carpo
I use android phones and have found many responsive sites to be horribly slow.
Scrolling is the main thing I notice, and sometimes it is so slow ijusteave
the site. Unfortunately, your site was this slow. I use an HTC One with the
Dolphin browser.

I also have it set to the desktop user agent instead of android, as I would
rather view the desktop site than a mobile one. With the resolution on this
phone, and pretty good eyesite, I find this a much better experience.
Responsive sites don't seem to have a desktop option, so I'm usually left
dissatisfied with them.

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ww520
This is very cool. Good idea and good design. I wish my forms are as pretty.
Good work and keep it up.

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nish1500
Thank you!

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ivanbrussik
holy cow, this is so cool. yes a few problems but i LOVE it

~~~
nish1500
Thanks

