Caldera Forms 1.5 is a major update to Caldera Forms. It adds 9 new field types, a front-end entry viewer, a REST API and more to Caldera Forms. We posted a preview of what was coming last month, detailing the new features when the first beta was released. In the last month, in addition to taking time off for the holidays, and releasing a minor update for Caldera Forms 1.4, we have been hard at work on finishing Caldera Forms 1.5.
All Caldera Forms users are strongly encouraged to test this new beta on their staging or local development sites and open any issues they find in the GitHub issue tracker. Please review the new features and see the notes below.
Important Notes
This new version has literally hundreds of new features and hooks. Not only are their new features, but a ton of work has been done “under the hood” to improve the code and provide better stability moving forward. Every effort has been made to offer backwards compatibility, but we are humans and this is a complex plugin with tons of add-ons.
A major goal of this release was to standardize how CSS and JavaScript is loaded by the plugin and to reduce the number of HTTP requests. If you have enqueued or denqueued CSS or JavaScript from Caldera Forms, this might be an issue for you. While the handles we use have stayed the same, many files are now combined. We now have a filter to load unmified files, which may be helpful in these situations and is also helpful if you wish to use a plugin that minifies and combines CSS and JavaScript.
The new front-end entry viewer is really cool. In the first beta it was super-beta. It is now functional, and supports optionally allowing non-admins to view entries. Because form entry data can contain sensitive information, you must add an extra argument to the entry-viewer shortocode to allow entries to be viewed by non-admins, which I believe is a sensible way to address a potential privacy concern.
The front-end entry viewer is functional, but minimal, I’d love to know features our users think it should have. Open a feature request on Github to help shape the evolution of this feature.
Thank you for using Caldera Forms. Please test, the final release of this plugin is coming soon.
Getting The Beta
This new beta is available through Github and WordPress.org. It is not the default version, 1.4.8 is still the version installed through WordPress. You can download the plugin from WordPress.org using this link, or you pull the 1.5.x branch on Github.
Caldera Forms – Drag and drop responsive WordPress form builder