While it seemed like everyone was at Plone Conference week before last, one person who I definitely missed was Steve McMahon, author of the just-released PloneFormGen.

PloneFormGen went 1.0 during the conference, and I think it is one of the most useful and important Plone products to come out in the past few months.   It's a basic form-building tool for Plone that lets users build web forms entirely through Plone.  Form results can be emailed or saved in tab-delimted format for later download. 

PloneFormGen builds on the many good ideas of its predecessor, PloneFormMailer.  Unlike PloneFormMailer, though, PloneFormGen doesn't dump users into the ZMI. That's a huge leap forward for usability

PloneFormGen is not just a great product.  Since making his initial "0.0.1" release back in August, Steve's made PloneFormGen a great model for open-source Plone product development.  Rather than developing silently, and releasing something "when it's ready," Steve made an initial release as soon as he a product that did something.  He clearly communicated where he wanted to go with it, asked for suggestions, and made a series of rapid incremental releases every time he got a new feature working.  This open, transparent process attracted several contributors, and generated some great ideas that made it into the 1.0 release last week. 

I'm confident that we'll be making PloneFormGen a standard product that we ship with all of our projects from here on out. 

Thanks, Steve!