The funny thing about developing a tool that is designed to be as intuitive and easy to use, for non technical users, is that it can leave you, the developer out. The goal for Caldera Forms has always been to create something that anyone can use, but has all of the tools a developer needs.
Run action, our “do it your self” form processor is a simple tool that lets developers use Caldera Forms as a front-end and process the data anyway they choose. In this new release, the add-on grew the ability to fire a filter, and there is more control over when it runs.
This free plugin can be downloaded here or installed through the WordPress admin.
The User Zero Story
This form processor originated from one of my first times using Caldera Forms, before I ever considered teaming up with David. I was working on a project where I had already built PHP classes for updating my fairly complex data structures. I needed a flexible, and responsive form tool for my UI, and I’m no David Cramer when it comes to UI, so I tried Caldera Forms.
My initial thought was, “awesome, but I just need the front-end, I can save the data myself.” I told David that through Pods IRC — this was back in the pre-Slack all the things era, and he made the first version of the run action add-on. It’s a very simple plugin, that exposes form data using a hook.
In that project, I created a simple callback that ran some conditional logic to choose the right class to process the data, and I was done. Awesome.
Remember that this was one of my first times using Caldera Forms and before I knew how it worked internally. That’s the cool part about this add-on, you don’t need to know how Caldera Forms works. As long as you know your code, and how hooks work, you can do what ever you need.
Have You Tried It Yet?
Its no secret that there are a lot of great form builders out there for WordPress. We really hope you will enjoy our different approach to the form builder admin. If you’re a developer, you’ll pick up our form builder interface in seconds, and with this free add-on you don’t need to learn anything about our internals to integrate Caldera Forms with your code.