Looking for the Kirby of online forms

[daizumi]

Thanks for the thorough response and the recommendations, @AugustMiller!

@AugustMiller

Your last paragraph sounds like you may need something a little more robust than a simple form-building tool. If you’re accepting payments, it sounds like you’ll need to consider a platform of your own!

Well, at least Jotform (the client’s first choice) does accept payments out of the box. If we could style it well enough and be able to avoid the iframe scrollbar, that would do the trick. Kind of ugly solution but reliable and flexible.

@AugustMiller

Do you need to add/edit forms on the fly, or does the experience and technology revolve around one key action that your users are performing?

Not exactly on the fly, but maybe bianual small changes to the form (every application round), for which the client wants to have control over.

@AugustMiller

For what it’s worth: most of the requirements could be satisfied by FormKeep. You’d need to be responsible for validation and file uploads, but are otherwise free to define the structure of the data you send. On the other end of FormKeep, you can send your data to Zapier and push it out to whatever other services you like.

Wow, FormKeep is great! That’s the kind of tool I was talking about (the Kirby of form-builders? hard to compare them…). The problem is it won’t allow the client to build the forms themselves, so I think for this particular assignment it won’t work, but I see us using it soon for other projects. Validation, like you said, would take a lot of effort, but I reckon there must be JS libraries/toolkits to help with that, right?

@AugustMiller

It’s possible (but potentially unreliable) to integrate Stripe or another payment processor into FormKeep submissions, and you’d need to acknowledge that the records would never really be tied together by any one piece of software. Overall, it sounds like you are looking for a custom ORM or database solution—maybe worth another conversation with the client about their needs, and come up with a couple options?

To give you more context: we’re a web design studio, focused on creative, cutting-edge frontend aesthetics, with not that complex backend programming. We’re self-taught programmers so a custom ORM is far out of reach. Integrating Stripe is however an option, especially since there’s Shopkit for Kirby, which we might be using anyway for a mini online shop.

@AugustMiller

I’d love to say that Kirby is a good fit (and, it probably can do everything you’re looking to), but it of course depends on the amount of time you can invest in a custom solution vs. an off-the-shelf product!

I should have said we’ve already developed the site in Kirby. Now it’s a bit too late to move to another integral custom solution. It’s more about minimizing damages with embedding external services and guiding the client in not choosing a provider that would make our design job a nightmare.

@AugustMiller

Edit: I hate to ask, but have you considered Squarespace? Pretty good parity with this list, albeit spread out across a few features… (commerce, forms, custom templates + scripts).

You hate asking for the same reason I would hate using it.

Thanks a lot again!