The latest version of Formulize is now available, including truly awesome performance improvements. Formulize is a module that lets you do data management and reporting in your website, all the way from simple survey forms, to complex data-driven workflows. In development and testing for this release, the most complex query we could come up with dropped from taking nearly 10 minutes, to taking under 10 seconds! That wasn't an every day situation, but it tells you how dramatic the changes are.

This release includes many other neat changes, including full number formatting, so dollar figures can look like dollar figures, and if you're not in English North America, you can change the defaults in the module preferences to use whatever is appropriate for your area.

Another exciting change is that "derived" values are now stored in the database. For example, if you have a form that asks people to type in expenses, and you want to add them up and show the person a total at the bottom of the form, Formulize can do that, but the totals used to be calculated on the fly, every time the page loaded. Now those kind of "derived" values are stored in the database, so you can use them in searches and do sorts and other operations on them, just like regular data that a user entered.

This release also features a new streamlined readme, and a more detailed "Getting Started Guide" which includes more explanations, and some troubleshooting tips. Look for more documentation as we move towards the 4.0 release. See the roadmap for details.

Over a 7 month period, there were several hundred changes going into this release (read about them in the SVN log). A big thank you as always to all the users and contributors who continually drive the vision forward, especially our clients who actively use Formulize. As Thoreau said, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them." Our clients are always surveying a nearby cloud, as we furiously try to build foundations under their needs.

Thanks for reading, good luck to all with their sites,

--The Freeform Solutions Team