DrupalCon Barcelona 2015: Webform vs. Entityform: Exposing forms to end users

Exposing forms to end user is one of the most requested features in every Drupal site. We can use it for surveys, contact forms, applications and many other uses.

Since Drupal 4.4, there is a de facto standard module for this kind of forms, that is the well known Webform module. This module allow users to create survey forms out of the box in an easy way and create notifications and statistics from the data obtained in that forms. There is also a big ecosystem of modules around Webform that helps to add new features and integrate it with other Drupal modules and subsystems.

With the arrival of Drupal 7, a new competitor appeared on the scene. The Entityform module takes the advantage of the new entities to provide a more standard way to create forms to end users. These forms use the standard Drupal fields. This means that out of the box, you can use any standard Drupal field. Given that this module provides a new entity type, forms are integrated smoothly with some other Drupal modules like Views or Rules.

Both approaches have their own pros & cons. There is no a magic recipe that works in all the possible scenarios and it is necessary to make a decision in each project.

This session will include a retrospective of some of the most installed modules to provide end user forms. Then we will compare Webform and Entityform to help to decide which option is the best in each case, depending on the project requirements. Last part of this session will be an overview of the future of this topic in Drupal 8 at his point.