Today I’m proud to announce that ConsultPress is the first of our themes to have official support for Caldera Forms and all its add-ons. As soon as you upgrade to ConsultPress v1.2.0 you can start using Caldera Forms with confidence that the style of your forms will match the theme’s look & feel and all the functionality will work flawlessly.
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Why did we decide to add official Caldera Forms support to ConsultPress?
Caldera Forms is a drag & drop, responsive form builder plugin for WordPress. A month ago, I had a conversation with Josh Pollock, the Founder and Lead Developer for Caldera Labs. During our Skype call, he exposed the following observation:
Many times people want to use Caldera Forms, but will face visual inconsistencies or functional misbehaviour with the theme they use. It would be so much easier if I’d know which themes work flawlessly with Caldera Forms. I could recommend these themes when plugin users ask me which themes work for sure and provide beautiful appearance of the forms on the frontend.
This rang the bell immediately. One of the major issues with the WordPress themes and plugins ecosystem is that it’s impossible to tell in advance how the plugin will look like and if it will even work. If the plugin is premium (paid) the problem is even bigger: you might pay for something that you will not be able to use later on. You cannot rely on neither theme or plugin support that they will fix the issue or roll out the timely update only for you.
I’ve heard nothing but good stuff about Caldera Forms and decided that we will try it out in the ConsultPress theme first.
The results were as expected: the plugin worked with the theme out of the box. But we went an extra mile and improved some minor visual inconsistencies via CSS overrides.
Is ConsultPress the only our theme with the official Caldera Forms support?
At the moment, yes. At least officially. As always, we will be monitoring how many people start using it and we plan to progressively add support to other themes as well. It is worth mentioning at this point that 99% Caldera Forms will work with any our theme out of the box, even if we didn’t test it yet. How’s that possible? The reason is that both products (plugin and our themes) have been written strictly following the WordPress and PHP best coding practices.
Let me know in the comments below if you have a mind a particular theme you’d like to see official support for Caldera Forms.
ConsultPress was a good match because of the business type this theme is aimed for. Consultants and personal coaches will often need forms on their website for many different scenarios: newsletter sign-ups, paid workshops, contact forms, individual coaching hours… the list goes on. This aligns nicely with our philosophy: creating WP themes that help small local businesses thrive online and bring more sales via their website.
Our experience with Caldera Forms
We haven’t used this plugin before, so we’d like to share some views on it as well. Maruša and Marko were in charge for testing and implementation, respectfully. Here’s what they have to say on it:
Marusa
I liked the fact that I could start building a contact form without going through documentation. The user interface makes it easy to understand how to do it with very few trial and error. The design of Caldera Forms blended nicely with that of ConsultPress theme so I didn’t have to apply any additional CSS to improve the styling, which was great.
Marko
Caldera Forms is a great upgrade to currently available form plugins. I was most impressed with the simple but powerful layout builder which helped me make different form layouts in no time.
During the testing and implementation, we’ve also spotted some steps that were not the most intuitive and could be improved. I’m always happy when people report the difficulties they’ve experienced and the improvements they suggest because this allows me to improve the product for everyone.
When Marko sent the list of our observations (+ how they could be improved) to Josh here was his reaction:
This is great feedback, I really appreciate it. This suggests a few small changes for adding fields, that I think will make a big difference, and you should expect to see in Caldera Forms
1.5.1.
The attitude of the developer to UX improvements greatly impacts if I want to cooperate with him/her in the future. I need to trust him in order to recommend their products or services to our theme buyers. I feel this is my (our) responsibility. After receiving his reply, I have no hesitation to recommend Josh’s WP products and I am keen to see what he releases in the future!
