ChronoForms is an excellent and FREE Joomla component for creating forms within the Joomla Content Management System (CMS).

ChronoForms iseasy to install and pretty easy to use. There isn’t much documentation, but they provide a good introduction video and have an excellent forum. Also, they are very responsive to questions on the forum, but if you are in the United States, there will be about a 12 hour delay because ChronoEngine is in England.

The best thing about ChronoForms is that you can create your forms using Dreamweaver or any text editor. This is especially helpful when you have a big form containing more than five fields. Once you have created and styled the form, you can paste the html code into ChronoForms.

Other features that make ChronoForms a great choice for integrating forms into Joomla CMS:

• Extensive built-in form validation scripts
• The ability to add your own php or javascript valadation to the form
• Easily creates a database table to hold the form data.
• The ability to view submitted data using the Joomla Administration screens.
• The ability to easily download form data and save it as a CSV file or an Excel file.
• The ability to add the form to your menu or embed it in a content page.

The one big flaw in ChronoForms is that it is probably NOT the right form tool for non-technical users. But then I think the creation of forms is probably one of the more technical aspects of building a website. As a result, maybe the building of forms should be left to web designers. However, it would be nice to have a WYSIWYG, point-and-click form plugin for Joomla where anyone who can use a word processor could build a form. Phil Taylor’s PhilaForm comes close to that, but the validation functions are too difficult for non-technical users.

Finally, even though ChronoForms is FREE, you will have to pay $25 for a five-site license to remove the ChronoForms link that appears below all forms. As I have said before, paying for plugins is a GOOD idea. In fact, I think it’s the right thing to do. Unless you are building a site for a non-profit or a personal site that is NOT commercial, it’s only fair to pay for the work of others. And twenty-five dollars is a small fee to pay for a tool that does so much.