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A simple form builder application written with AngularJS (github.com)
43 points by manpreetrules 4506 days ago
6 comments

I strongly prefer static site generation (in all their flavors, but Harp.js is my current poison). But I live in a world where the technically challenged need to author content and make minor changes.

"Best of breed" (whatever that means) suggests Drupal and like are the route to go, but it is difficult for me to justify the hosting costs, monitoring, and whatnot required for a dynamic content server for largely static content.

I have lately been dreaming of a poor man's CMS and workflow and I now see something like the linked AngularJS Form builder can play a role.

* Static site generator leveraging JSON files to hold content. Most SSGs support JSON data in templates.

* Standalone dynamic server to fulfill the need to provide a more accessible UI to create content.

* Content types are created using a form builder. No need for anything pretty, we're just creating content.

* Content instances are created using resulting form.

* Preview content.

* When content author is ready, submit for approval.

* Everything backed by Git (revision all the things) with support for branches, tags, forking... authoring content creates a branch. Submitting for approval is a pull request. Deploying tags the version, generates the static site, and pushes to S3/CloudFront.

Does something like this exist? I should probably just prototype it.

This blog post from Asana is proving inspirational for my team:

http://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/

http://statamic.com/ is the CMS and it provides a nice interface for content owners - although Asana uses the online Github interface for editing content.

Plone does the same thing.
That is a name I have not heard in a long time. A long, long time...
In a galaxy far, far away... yea, it's old, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work. I hate that when for example in medicine, everyone is getting prescribed paroxetine whereas fluoxetine is generally more effective. People assume because something is new that it's better.
Pretty cool! I was thinking to create the same thing to make building forms less tedious. I usually switch to Jade whenever I have too much HTML to type out.

Question: Why linking to a cloned repo? The fork is 0 commits behind the master, so nothing is changed from the source.

Link to the source repo:

https://github.com/Selmanh/angularjs-form-builder

thanks :)
Thank you for sharing this. However, IMHO form builder is the last thing that could be reused in different projects. How a form is presented and submitted and navigation is handled vary a lot from one project to another project.
You should really use ng-cloak so that things that havent been bound dont show up until they are ready

Here in particular: http://selmanh.github.io/angularjs-form-builder/#/forms/1/vi...

yes, i am aware of that, will be fixed soon.
For those who need a bare-bones view model of a submittable form with parameters, there's this:

https://github.com/myplanetdigital/angular-action

Uses promises!