Developer's perspective: so-so

  • Pros:
    – creating a form is simple
    – adding the form directly to a PHP template is easy
    – adding custom classes to form fields is easy (this is a biggie!!)

    Cons:
    – Sub-par UX design & wording; thus things that should be simple are complicated. “Notifications” is not a very intuitive term for emails, redirects and success messages – what’s wrong with “Actions”?? And putting these actions anywhere but in the ‘form settings’ pane, where they should be, is totally bizarre. I had to search other-user’s feedback to figure out how to accomplish the basic task of sending the admin an email upon form submission. Because never in a million years would I have thought to look for it in ‘notifications’.
    – Ninja forms only seems to support one captcha extension…. which is no longer available (Picatcha has been discontinued, according to the picatcha site). Soooooo, yeah that’s kind of a problem. I’ve sent them a ticket to ask about this, so, we’ll see where that goes. Which brings me to:
    – They don’t monitor the support forum on www.ads-software.com, which, fine, but to my dismay they don’t have a forum on their own site, either. Tickets only. Really?? Why would they waste so much of their OWN time (let alone users’ time) responding privately to individual tickets, when so many tickets could be prevented by having a solid forum? 1:many is more efficient than 1:1… I thought everyone knew this? That’s why forums are, you know, a thing?? Totally baffling, man.

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  • I’d like to hop in here briefly. I’m not affiliated with the plugin in any way other than that I have contributed to the codebase and I have built a couple of extensions.

    Not having a forum should never been seen as a “waste of time”. On the contrary, managing a support forum is extremely time consuming. I can tell you from personal experience because I have managed public support forums for more than two dozen plugins, including several that have over 200k active users.

    A private ticketing system is 100x+ more efficient to manage from an administration perspective than a public support forum is. It can also be exceptionally superior for customers because they get their questions answered faster since it is easier and more efficient for support staff.

    If you’d like, I’d be happy to point you to several other opinions on exactly support forums are terribly difficult to manage compared to private support tickets.

    On a side note, the developers of Ninja Forms are always open to feedback and suggestions on their Github account: https://github.com/wpninjas/ninja-forms

    Plugin Author James Laws

    (@jameslaws)

    @604steph, thank you for your thorough review. While we may disagree on some of your points we really appreciate that you offered a completely valid review from your own personal perspective. Since you have provided such a detailed review I wanted to provide an equally thoughtful response.

    The UI is constantly improving. Notifications is actually the industry adopted term for email that are sent to “notify” you that a form was submitted. That being said the Notifications system is so much more than just emails and for that very reason we have been playing around with what to call it. I would disagree that “actions” is clearer for setting up emails but that may be for a redirect. We are contemplating calling it something like “Emails & Actions” or something similar. Also, the system is meant to be fully extensible. It doesn’t fit under just Form Settings anymore. There is too much other stuff going on there. Especially with other add-Ons. We know there is room for improvement but we haven’t found the ultimate name for this section yet.

    Concerning captchas. We plan on integrating a Recaptcha and Akismet integration in the future but since Ninja Forms ships with 3 anti-spam solutions out of the box that have taken care of 100% of our spam it’s not the priority at this time. It’s on the roadmap but just not urgent.

    Pippin has addressed this very well but to expound here is a post we write about this very topic: https://ninjaforms.com/dont-use-public-support-forums/. I think you will find that the vast majority of successful businesses are moving away from forums as a support solution.

    Also, as Pippin pointed out, Ninja Forms is on GitHub and we always welcome new contributors to the project as we are in the business of making Ninja Forms the best free form plugin around. We’ll do it on our own if we have to but it just will take a little longer. ??

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