Today is a very big day for the Ninja Forms team and our users. Over two years in planning and one year in development has finally culminated in the official release of THREE!
Live and available today, current users will start seeing the upgrade available in your WordPress dashboards shortly.
What is THREE exactly?
THREE is version 3.0 of Ninja Forms and is the most beautiful piece of software we have ever worked on or with inside of WordPress.
It is a complete rewrite of the user interface and the underlying code that powers it; a reimagining of how a WordPress form builder should be built. In fact, it’s a reimagining of how any WordPress plugin might be built, regardless of its purpose.
Ninja Forms THREE is a labor of love. Not for the love of form building specifically, but the love of creating a better user experience for all.
The Only Thing That Changed Is Everything!
Yeah, okay. I stole that from Apple, but it’s absolutely appropriate in this situation. Here is a bird’s eye view of just some of what’s new for both users and developers:
For Users
- A gorgeous new drag & drop user interface that is second to none.
- Streamlined and simplified settings throughout.
- Sandboxed forms so you can edit on the fly forms without impacting your visitors.
- An undo manager so you can easily revert changes while building.
- Even more control through our Email & Actions system.
- New pricing fields to make it easier than ever to sell your products or services.
- A more powerful merge tags system so you can dynamically populate your Fields and Actions with even more data.
If you want to see how clean and powerful the new Ninja Forms builder is, just check out this video on our Layout & Styles add-on! Or better yet, get Ninja Forms THREE for yourself and experience the difference!
For Developers & Designers
- Ninja Forms is more modular and flexible than ever before.
- Completely rebuilt using technologies like Backbone, Underscore, and Marionette.
- Backbone radio events make it easy to execute code at specific times, or get data anywhere within the builder.
- Front-end templating allows developers to swap out HTML elements without modifying any PHP files.
- Extended developer community with detailed codex and tutorials.
- Slack community making the Ninja Forms team more accessible to developers.
- KOZO add-on generator empowering developers to create add-ons rapidly.
While we want Ninja Forms to be a delightful experience for every user, we also want developers to enjoy the flexibility and process of extending it for your own awesome creations. We think Ninja Forms THREE is a huge leap forward in that direction. See what other developers have had to say so far.
But Wait! There’s More!
Thanks to our friends over at GoDaddy, Ninja Forms THREE is already available in 29 different languages. Version 2.x had only 8 languages with 50% or more string coverage. This is an amazing gift from the GoDaddy team to all of our international Ninja Forms users and we’re so excited to be able to launch with this kind of coverage.
Where do we go from here?
This has been an active, year-long process. Unless you’ve been watching closely you may have thought there wasn’t a lot going on with Ninja Forms. Our (seeming) lack of innovation, featureless updates, and absence of new add-ons have all led up to this day.
We will take the next couple weeks and focus on feedback from users, bugfixes we couldn’t have anticipated or tested for, and updating some of the remaining add-ons for compatibility with Ninja Forms THREE.
It’s Your Turn!
Don’t take our word for it…try it out for yourself today!
Give us your feedback! Report issues you find so we can make it better!
Celebrate with us on your favorite social media channel.
It’s the start of an era of rapid growth and innovation. The foundation that has been laid today is going to springboard fantastic new integrations and applications built by us and the greater Ninja Forms community. We can’t wait for you to see what’s next.
This is not the end… it is only the beginning!
Justin Busa says:
Congrats, James and team! THREE is amazing!
James Laws says:
Thanks so much, Justin! We’re so excited! The team worked so hard on this and I couldn’t be prouder.
Chetan Prajapati says:
Thank you and Congratulations to Ninja Forms Team!!! I love the new features.
James Laws says:
Chetan, thank you! We’re proud of what we created and excited at the possibilities it opens up.
Luke Cavanagh says:
Nice looking clean UI.
James Laws says:
Thanks, Luke! That what we were going for so it’s nice to know we accomplished that much. 🙂
J2O says:
Woohoo! 🙂
X-Raym says:
Bravo for your great work on this plugin!
It is cool to see how passionate you are in your work 🙂
Quay Morgan says:
Thank you! We do love what we do. Helps a lot 🙂
Andy says:
Congrats on the milestone! One question: I’ve updated to 3.0, but I’m still seeing the “THREE IS COMING” notice in my dashboard. Is this a known issue, or a problem on my end?
Quay Morgan says:
Hey Andy! It’s a known issue and we’re actually discussing how to best handle it now. If you go to Forms>Settings>Advanced Settings and see a Ninja Forms THREE “Update and Convert Forms” option, you should be able to run that and the banner will go away. Not an ideal solution but it ought to do the trick now and we’ll patch it asap. Sorry for the delayed response!
Cheers,
Quay
Jake Garrison says:
Has something changed with the update pushed this morning? I have a form that uses some pretty elaborate calculations. It was my understanding that those were not able to be converted (according to this https://ninjaforms.com/owning-backwards-incompatibility-three/). Yesterday I had an “x” next to the form with calculations, but today there is a green checkbox. Did you guys end up adding in calculations migration?
James Laws says:
Jake, actually yes!
We worked hard on the process and we’ve added migrations for calculations. In our testing this has been pretty reliable, but like everything, if you have a complicated set-up, I would highly recommend trying the conversion on some sort of a staging environment first. 🙂
Jake Garrison says:
Awesome! Thanks!