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Privacy Forms Studio: Next-Generation Forms in Plone: Privacy-First, Secure, and Powered by SurveyJS
Frontend
Business
Integrator
Backend
Intermediate
Forms are a core part of many Plone projects: contact forms, registrations, applications, surveys, internal workflows, and structured data collection. Existing solutions such as PloneFormGen and collective.easyform have served the community well, but modern projects often need richer form logic, better usability, stronger privacy guarantees, cleaner storage models, and more flexible integrations. This talk presents Privacy Forms Studio, a new SurveyJS-based approach to building modern forms in Plone.

Details

SurveyJS is a JavaScript toolkit for creating, rendering, and managing forms and surveys using JSON-based form definitions. It provides a visual form builder, many field types, validation, conditional logic, branching, theming, dashboards, and PDF-related functionality. As a practical side note, the SurveyJS Creator and Dashboard components require a commercial developer license. The licensing model is per developer, royalty-free for redistribution as part of an application, and moderate enough to be realistic for both small Plone integrators and larger organizations. Privacy Forms Studio integrates this model into Plone. Forms can be created with a drag-and-drop editor, stored as versioned JSON definitions, previewed, restored, exported, and reused. Submissions can be stored in Plone, exported to formats such as JSON, CSV, Excel, Markdown, DOCX, text, or PDF, or forwarded through email, webhooks, custom Python actions, or Plone events. A key focus is security and robustness. The solution builds on Plone’s mature security model: roles, permissions, workflows, authentication, authorization, and access control can be applied to forms and submissions. Editing, viewing, exporting, deleting, and processing submissions can be controlled explicitly. Privacy-aware processing is also central: notifications do not need to include submitted data, AI is optional, and sensitive data can remain fully under the organization’s control. The talk will also cover the storage layer. Form definitions and submitted data are handled separately. Schemas are stored as JSON with versioning, while submissions can be stored in Plone or, for larger installations, connected to external storage such as PostgreSQL or MySQL. This makes the architecture suitable both for classic Plone websites and larger organizational workflow systems. Another important aspect is the open-source roadmap. The core functionality of Privacy Forms Studio, including the AI-assisted form creation features, is planned to be made available as open-source in time for the Plone Conference. This ensures that the project can be evaluated, extended, and discussed openly within the Plone community. Finally, the session will discuss optional AI-assisted form creation, PDF import/export, digital signatures, and the idea of a central form server for Plone and non-Plone applications. The goal is not just to replace existing form add-ons, but to show how Plone can become a strong platform for secure, privacy-conscious, and future-proof digital form workflows