While your first encounter with PeakZebra may catch you a little off guard, especially if you’re coming from a WordPress background, the ideas behind it are actually very straightforward. Which is what makes them powerful, of course.
Halfway with Forms
Particularly in the WordPress world, there’s this notion of an add-on called a “forms package.”
A forms package lets you create forms, needless to say. These forms are presented to users on the front end of your site and when they fill them out and press the submit button…
Actually, that’s where the capabilities of a forms package begin to peter out. In the simplest instance, the data from the form will be plopped into an email in text format and sent to a pre-configured email address (your address, roughly speaking). What happens to the data at that point is your problem.
If all you want to do is toss the name and email into an email mailing service, then that’s likely to work just fine. Most of the larger such services are integrated enough with the dominant forms packages that they can pick up new entries without manual intervention.
There are also forms packages that offer the capability to dump all your form responses into a database table. While that’s a start–and it might even be ok if you only have one form active on your site–but since it literally dumps the data from every form into the same data table, what you typically wind up with is a jumble that you have to sort out by hand. It’s a feature that I don’t really believe anyone with more than one form actually uses.
Enter the Table
Out in the world beyond WordPress, there are several options for ad-hoc applications that start with a table. The original example of this is arguably Google Sheets, even though it’s a spreadsheet, not a database table, strictly speaking. A lot of people use it strictly for columns and rows of data, though. Plus it’s easy and automatic to connect a form (one form, and you can’t control what it looks like) to a table. A more purpose-built version of the same thing is Airtable, which gets an enormous amount of mileage out of good looks (though you can’t change them much) and support for a whole lot of bells and whistles (scripts, automations, widgets that aggregate data and chart it).
The Initial Insight: Known Tables
PeakZebra combines the forms package and better-structured, more “Airtable-like” tables. In a departure from other tools out there, PeakZebra starts with a set of pre-defined tables. This has a couple of advantages. First, it’s faster to get going (it’s also just plain faster) because you don’t have to create fields for obvious things like “city” or “email”.
Second, it makes it easy to tie form fields to the tables. So in PeakZebra, if you add a text field to a form, you can pick which table and which table column you’re connecting to that instance of the text field input. If you want “city”, you just select it over in the right-hand-side column with the various configuration options for that field.
A third, huge differentiator for PeakZebra is that using known tables means we can supply various templates for different kinds of applications and they will–because they are tied to the same underlying tables–be inherently interconnected.
Second Insight: Fields are Blocks
The pages you visit as part of a PeakZebra application are built with the WordPress block editor, using blocks.
Of particular instance, when (and if) you build custom forms as part of your application, each field and each button is a block. So you have enormous control over what your form looks like and how it performs.
Third Insight: It’s Not that It’s WordPress
It runs on WordPress, but what matters is that it runs on a WordPress that provides you with your own SaaS service. So you don’t have to “run” or “administer” WordPress. You just use your customized service. It’s SaaS, but ultimately it belongs to you.
There are plenty of long-time WordPress professionals who will tell you that WordPress is too complex for its own good. I don’t agree, but I’ll readily concede that it’s very confusing to get started with, even if it does offer a lot of power and flexibility.
Thus, while a PeakZebra instance is running on WordPress, the idea is that you’ll be largely unaware of this. You never log into the “admin” side of WordPress (unless you know your way around and want to do something unusual). If you opt to edit the pages of your applications, you’ll be doing so in the WordPress block editor, but in a cleaned-up version that prevents some of the confusions that have made some people less than thrilled about the interface.
In short, even if you’re the admin for your instance of PeakZebra, you don’t have to be the admin on the WordPress instance running behind the scenes. You show up to the website as a user. If you’re the admin, you show up as a user with access to PeakZebra admin functions (adding a new team member, for instance).
Thus
The core ideas that power PeakZebra are pretty simple at the end of the day: tie forms and tables together from the get-go, build the forms from standard block components, and use the strengths of the WordPress platform without forcing people to learn WordPress just to take advantage of the good stuff.