We are very pleased to announce that we have finally released eForm version 3.5. It has been a non-stop work for more than a month and the result is quite astonishing. Before we dig into what’s new and what’s hot, let us, just for the sake of it (and of course to take pride) share some interesting statistics from our work lab.
Statistics of v3.5
There has been a total of 318 commits between v3.4 and v3.5. The chart above shows total commit since v2.x (this is the time we started using git and gitlab for our development).
Right now, about 60% of the project is PHP, 20% is JavaScript and 15% is CSS. The figure looks really good considering the combination of style, interactivity and functionality.
A New approach to CSS development
Previously I would hand-craft all of the CSS files. This was actually quite tedious and I was looking for a better way to write and organize CSS files. This necessity ultimately inspired me to use SCSS a fast, reliable and very powerful CSS compiler. Since I develop in windows, I used Koala for compiling the SCSS files.
After using SCSS approach for eForm and some other projects, I can say confidently that I am not going back to writing generic CSS ever again. With all the features of nesting, looping, variables, mixin it has everything a programmer would look for. SCSS not only helped me speed up the process, but it gave me flexibility to organize different style components into separate files and folders for rapid development. Moreover, I have actually used scssphp to compile the designs for custom styled forms.
If you are a SCSS admirer and a frontend developer then you would find customizing the core CSS of eForm has become very simple now. We have provided all of the source codes of SCSS packed with eForm and have enabled source mapping to quickly debug the files.
Lot of JavaScript Optimization
eForm v3.5 comes with a lot of JS optimization. For starter we now load scripts only when relevant form elements are used. All of the scripts would now go into the footer of the page, instead of the header.
The main JS files have also been rewritten to accept the optimization changes. These all resulted in fast and scalable forms which can easily handle more than 100 elements.
We also reconfigured the backend script to apply UI element to the active part of the form builder only. So now, if you have over 200 form elements you wouldn’t have to wait like 30 seconds for the form builder to load. It would just take all the HTML and apply JS only when necessary.
Fresh New Themes
It was difficult to make the existing themes look modern. So we took the audacity to remove them all and start afresh. This resulted in development of over 38 Material inspired themes.
We have also included a theme customizer so that you can easily create your own theme by just selecting a few colors.
Although we have removed the bootstrap theme, but we have kept the files because we intend to reintroduce the design in a near future.
All of this comes free to our existing and new customers. We hope you will like it.