This is the biggest, most feature rich form editor I’ve ever seen for a form plugin. The sheer number of fields compared with the column editor gives the user a lot of options to customize the forms.

Feature wise the drag and drop editor is pretty much the same as other form plugins, however I found the column editor really useful. Basically, you can set up fields inside columns.

One great thing about the editor is how you can create columns and rows. This results in bootstrap compatible templates to be used on the frontend. They are also responsive too.

Creating a field is simple. Click on the + icon inside the column and a new field dialog will popup from where you can select your field type. After selecting the field type, you’ll need to give it a unique name. That’s all to it. You can also add html inside the textarea in the field’s form to customize the label area.

Conceptually, the inputs need to be in a column. They can’t be in their own space. By default, columns will be full width. You can create subcolumns by clicking the dragger-like icon to subdivide columns. This is a great feature as single column forms with heaps of inputs can become complicated really quickly.

Plus, there’s support for merge tags. If you’ve used Mailchimp or Gravity forms, this will make a lot of sense when constructing complicated forms.

In theory the editor is extremely powerful, however, I found the editor to be very clunky. The buttons for creating new fields, arranging columns, etc are very small. When saving a form, the required fields are not highlighted. They only have a red border around them which can hard to locate. It would be good if Caldera forms could scroll to the field which doesn’t have a required field filled out.

On top of it, Caldera forms uses its own custom style instead of following the WordPress style guide – which is not a bad thing per se but their custom style is bad. Really bad. The input/button styling is probably done by the plugin creator’s nephew who has just started a webdesign course and the color scheme will make you puke – especially that green color.

Don’t get me wrong, its a pretty powerful editor but unless you’re only going to make a couple of forms and call it a day, the editor will be quite clunky to use.