7.3.5 GA6 Formbuilder Desaster

RE: 7.3.5 GA6 Formbuilder Desaster

2020-12-04T14:57:55Z

I am a bit ambigous here. To some degree, I agree with Olaf, Liferay has limited resources (or in other words: a limited number of developers) and so things sometimes stay "unfixed" for a long time. Especially when you use the CE version. And I get it, there are other constraints, paying customers determine to some degree how much emphasis is put on this or that feature, the demands of the market pull in lots of directions at the same time.

Liferay has several great features, a ton of things are quite awesom (I love asset publisher, it's simply a fantastic component, to name just one).

But maybe it also has too many features. As a result of the many features, they all must be developed and maintained.

Maybe as a result of the constraints, the forms are really not good. Liferay forms are pretty great for presentations, they look good on first glance, but when you try to implement real life usecases, they are simply not good enough. And contrary to other components that give you a nice starting point, extending them is not fun, adding fields or changing the behavior of fields (e.g. validation) is not well documented and horribly complicated.

And yes, I have already complained a lot about forms, two years ago I wrote a long evaluation after a discussion with a product manager at Devcon about the many things that bug me with forms.

But I honestly, in the mean time, I gave up on forms, we simply just don't use them and have build our own little solution for our usecases. Our most current solution uses fragments (A form is a fragment, each field is a fragment and you drag and drop them in the form). It also has some issues and limitations, but works pretty well.

Personally: I think the current solution should be scraped and replaced by something new. With an easy way to add fields, an easy way to add/change validators and so on. But, of course, since resources are limited, other things are prioritized. And I believe, rightly so, I think Fragments, Pages and "all things Webcontent", Headless,... are probably more important.

RE: 7.3.5 GA6 Formbuilder Desaster

2020-12-04T07:30:27Z

Olaf, your work on the forums is always appreciated. Thank you for the comments on this entry.

RE: 7.3.5 GA6 Formbuilder Desaster

2020-12-03T14:58:17Z

So to summarize: It was shipped out untested and that's why it is working as intended.

If that is your, Liferays, position on these problem I can live with it.

Regarding the "Open Source"-Comment:

Not many "Open Source"-Products have that bad documentation that they are unusable without digging into years old forums-threads* and because of that requiring you to buy pretty pricy (for Open Source) access to an (fastly) outdated university programm. We even did this for the main Liferay-Developer.

It's not our decision that the customer is not using DXP.

It's in your interest that Liferay is "in the talking" in a positive way.

Giving us such a buggy and unfinished version, presenting it in a way that it is "usable" is the opposite.

* the forum was usable. Now it is unusable, unreadable - old links don't work anymore, order is completely messed up and timestamps are missing. Just the icing on the cake.

RE: 7.3.5 GA6 Formbuilder Desaster

2020-12-03T11:43:49Z

Fredi,

You know that we're thankful for open an candid communication here. In this case I'd like to point out some aspects not of the issue at hand, but of the words chosen:

Open Source software has a monetary price tag of 0. And you can make money with it. Awesome, right?

OSS still comes at some cost: If you run into issues, it's fine (or expected, recommended, advisable) to file a bug ticket. You link to a bug ticket that you didn't even have to file yourself, and that has been created around the release date of GA6 (which you use) and marked as fixed on 4 November - long after release. There's no other release available yet - what kind of release information do you expect? Now that it's fixed, it'll likely be contained in the next release. Getting it earlier typically comes with a different price tag, if only for additional work effort on your end.

To play with a variation of your closing, slightly edited:

Your customers are paying you money - and just looking at the vast amount of subtasks listed on the ticket that you link, isn't it amazing how that much intensive work can find its way to the community, to make them money? And it's coming for free?

Back in 2008, when Liferay announced a commercial version, the community feared that everything would be closed down, and the company cashes out. Quite the opposite happened: Liferay CE stays freely available 12 years after, no questions asked. And it got a lot of new features since 2008. It doesn't look like this will change. I still stand by my own 2008 statement (from long before I got hired by Liferay).

With regards to your second and third issue: Did you file tickets? Or did you look into possible environmental causes? I can't reproduce your joke (third) in my GA6 installation with the information you provide.

If you file them: I wouldn't say the tone in a ticket influences how quickly it's being worked on, but if it'd be me, I'd rather put a smile on people's face than chosing an insulting tone. Both, a bug ticket, and a friendly (or at least neutral) tone, will make the world a better place. For free.

7.3.5 GA6 Formbuilder Desaster

2020-12-01T14:56:25Z

When presenting new "features" of Liferay 7.3.5 GA6 to a customer we noticed massive bugs that make the formbuilder in the current state hardly usable.

First:

"Form-Name": The formname or formid was a input field that gave developers the opportunity to target specific fields in multiple forms that are not visible to the enduser.

This "formname" field is now not editable anymore (well, it is if you just remove the disable tags and edit and save it anyway) so that existing solutions that need this field break.

In this ticket https://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-121561 that is marked as fixed there is no real, existing solution for this but still, the item is marked as fixed and complete. What am I missing?

Second:

With using the datepicker (Liferay Portal - German) is a desaster.

You pick a date, e.g. the 12th of november and...

Voila: you get the 11th of december.

You pick a date, e.g. the 23th of november and...

Voila: you get the... blank field, nothing. Try again.

Third:

Opening the formbuilder is not even possible on the first visit.

You need to open it. Wait. Wait a little bit longer. Javascript Error in the background. Then press F5 - Now it's working.

This must be some kind of joke, right?

Our customers is asking us now to evaluate other solutions than liferay and - I am sorry to say that - I am with him.
How is it possible that such mess can even find the way to the community?