I've been working in web development for a long time.
How long? If I remember right, I set up my first web server while avoiding dinosaurs.
While my memory is a bit hazy, I can distinctly remember that a task early in my career was building form processing CGI scripts for clients. Technology has come a long way since my humble beginnings.
Modern web technologies such as the Jamstack and the rise of static websites have often raised concerns about dynamic functions.
But I want to reassure you: integrating forms into your projects shouldn’t be a hassle.
In this post, I want to talk about a particularly efficient tool that you should add to your dev belt: Netlify Forms.
I’ll explore this feature in-depth:
- Netlify Forms basics
- Form customization
- Spam protection
- Enhanced Netlify forms submission
- Form notifications
Let’s add some context before getting all technical.
How I discovered Netlify Forms
In the old days, I used Perl (an incredibly flexible language) and had libraries to make form creation simpler, but it's shocking how often I had to write custom code just to take form input and send it along to someone else. Even after I eventually switched languages (ColdFusion FTW), I still spent a lot of time doing basic form processing.
That's why when I started getting heavily into the Jamstack (a few years ago, when we simply called them static web sites), form processing was my chief concern. Luckily a number of services have cropped up to support handling form input.
For example, my blog makes use of Formspree. It has a decent free tier (50 submissions per month), which works fine for my site.
However, I host on Netlify and one of the many services they provide is baked in form processing. If you don’t know Netlify yet, you should look into it right away. This team has done tremendous work to facilitate the integration of dynamic features into modern static, frontend-centric architectures (they also coined the term “Jamstack” back in 2015.)
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