The wait is over and Caldera Forms is now at least 250% more awesome. Caldera Forms 1.5 has 9 new field types, a conditional recipients processor, a front-end entry viewer, a REST API and more. This update is available now via WordPress.org.
In addition to these new features, the code base has been improved allowing for more rapid development and cool new capabilities for add-ons. For example, the update to our popular Connected Forms add-on that has been released today relies on new “under the hood” improvements in Caldera Forms 1.5.
New Fields!
- Rich Text Editor – A “What You See Is What You Get” input field. Perfect for front-end post submissions when combined with the Caldera Custom fields add-on.
- Summary – A live updating list of all fields and their values. Perfect for a “are you sure?” last page of a multi-page form.
- Better Phone Field – Features country specific formatting and validation. A massive improvement over the old phone fields.
- URL – A field that accepts website addresses only.
- Number Fields – Accepts numbers only with the ability to specify minimum, maximum and step size HTML attributes.
- Section Break Field – An easy way to add a section break
- Credit Card Field – Card-type aware credit card number field. Includes length validation and formatting. Can be linked to secret code and expiration fields.
- Credit Card Secret Code Field – Secret code (CVC) field for credit cards, can be linked to credit card number field to ensure it is the length for card type entered.
- Credit Card Expiration Field – Formatted for month/year entry.
Front-End Entry Viewer
The new entry viewer in Caldera Forms provides a great way to show form entries in the front-end of your website. You get full control over what user roles can and can’t see submission data. It is a highly-dynamic and extensible system powered by the all new Caldera Forms REST API and VueJS.
This is just the start of what we can do with this new feature. We want to hear from users about what they’d like to see from this feature as it evolves.
Conditional Email Recipients
With this new, built-in form processor, you can choose who to send your email notifications to, based on field input. Choose who gets the lead notification email based on what kind of lead you have!
Other New Features
There are literally hundreds of new features if you count all the new functions, filters, and class methods added. But who is counting? I did and there are 312 instances of the @since 1.5.0 in our inline documentation 🙂
Here are some highlights of some other new features:
- More form templates!
- Setting to scroll form to the success or error notice after submission.
- Fewer JavaScript and CSS files in the front-end. Many files have been combined to improve performance.
- caldera_forms_render_assets_minify Filter to disable minification and combination of CSS and JavaScript, useful if you are doing your own optimization.
- caldera_forms_field_attributes Filter to change the HTML attributes that input type fields use
- A ton of new functions to make add-on development easier. Seriously read the changelog for some highlights.
- A more clear error when nonce verification fails — normally caused by poorly configured static HTML caching systems
? 50,000 And Growing! ?
This is the biggest update yet, and it sets the ground work for new and exciting features. Combined with the awesome growth of the plugin and the revenue from add-on sales, which funds development, I’m super excited about what comes next.
Andrew Lima joined our team last month as part time Support Engineer, Junior Developer and Space Astronaut Grade 1. His help in bug finding and fixing was huge for this release. My business partner Christie Chirinos, continues to be awesome at running the business, keeping things organized, growing and sane. Team Caldera is slowly growing and getting more awesome over time.
Also, special to Paal Joachim Romdahl who helped us a out a lot of beta testing for this release.
Seriously, an intense amount of thanks to everyone who uses Caldera Forms and spreads the word via a 5 star review or social media.
Earlier today we passed 50,000 active installs of Caldera Form, by the way, so clearly people like what we we’ve been doing, and I can’t wait for y’all to try all the fun new features.