PBJ Forms & Products 1.6.0: A Guide Inside the Plugin, a Theme Builder, and Products Without a Shop
PBJ Forms & Products 1.6.0 is out. You may know it as PBJ Form Builder — that is the same plugin, renamed, because it now builds more than forms. This release adds a complete guide inside the plugin, a theme builder, and the ability to turn any form into a product page. If you are updating from 1.4.0, you also get the spam-blocking work from 1.5.x in the same step, so this post covers all of it.
Why the new name
It started as a form builder. Then it learned to take payment, then to issue licence keys, and now to present the thing you are selling. Calling it a form builder undersold it. The plugin is now PBJ Forms & Products, and it appears in your WordPress sidebar as PBJ Forms+.
This is a name change and nothing else. Your existing forms, your submissions, your shortcodes and your licence key all keep working exactly as they are. There is nothing to migrate and no shortcode to rewrite.
A guide that actually walks you through it
The plugin now opens on a Guide screen with six tabs, each a start-to-finish walkthrough in plain language: making a form, making a product, putting either on a page, getting paid, and stopping spam. It includes a table of every field type with a note on when to use each one, and the first two tabs show a live status card so you can see what is already set up on your site rather than guessing.
If you have ever installed a form plugin and then gone hunting for a tutorial, this is that tutorial, sitting inside the plugin where you need it.
Make your forms look like your site
The last tab is a theme builder. Set the look of every form on your site from one screen, with a live preview that updates as you drag each control: eight colours, corner roundness, padding inside fields, spacing between them, maximum width, alignment, text size, label weight, an optional font, three field styles — outlined, underlined or filled — and four button styles, including full width, which tends to get the most taps on a phone.
No stylesheet editing and no fighting with your theme. And it is switched off until you turn it on, so updating changes nothing about how your forms look today.
Sell something without installing a shop
Any form can now carry a picture, a headline, a short description, a "what's included" bullet list and a note beside the price. Fill those in and a page containing nothing but the shortcode is a complete product page — no cart, no checkout plugin, no monthly fee.
Every one of those fields is optional. If your product page already carries the picture and the sales copy and just embeds the form at the bottom, leave the section blank and nothing changes at all.
Spam: mark it once, never hear from them again
If you are coming from 1.4.0, this part is new to you. Open a junk submission and click Spam. That sender's address is blocked for good and every submission it ever made is deleted. From then on they still see a normal thank-you message when they submit — nothing is stored, nobody is emailed, and no card is ever charged. They have no way to tell they were blocked, so they do not try to work around it.
The plugin then tells you which country that sender is in. If you also run PBJ Geo Viewer, one more click blocks that whole country, or just that one address. As always, there is no Google reCAPTCHA anywhere in this — the maths question, the hidden trap field and the speed check all run on your own server.
Upgrading
If your licence key is in place, the update appears in your WordPress dashboard as usual — Plugins, then Update. Your settings, forms and submissions are carried over automatically; the settings schema moves from 3 to 4 on first load and you do not need to do anything.
After updating, the sidebar entry changes from "Form Builder" to "PBJ Forms+". That is the only thing that moves.
PBJ Forms & Products 1.6.0 is out. You may know it as PBJ Form Builder — that is the same plugin, renamed, because it now builds more than forms. This release adds a complete guide inside the plugin, a theme builder, and the ability to turn any form into a product page. If you are updating from 1.4.0, you also get the spam-blocking work from 1.5.x in the same step, so this post covers all of it.
Why the new name
It started as a form builder. Then it learned to take payment, then to issue licence keys, and now to present the thing you are selling. Calling it a form builder undersold it. The plugin is now PBJ Forms & Products, and it appears in your WordPress sidebar as PBJ Forms+.
This is a name change and nothing else. Your existing forms, your submissions, your shortcodes and your licence key all keep working exactly as they are. There is nothing to migrate and no shortcode to rewrite.
A guide that actually walks you through it
The plugin now opens on a Guide screen with six tabs, each a start-to-finish walkthrough in plain language: making a form, making a product, putting either on a page, getting paid, and stopping spam. It includes a table of every field type with a note on when to use each one, and the first two tabs show a live status card so you can see what is already set up on your site rather than guessing.
If you have ever installed a form plugin and then gone hunting for a tutorial, this is that tutorial, sitting inside the plugin where you need it.
Make your forms look like your site
The last tab is a theme builder. Set the look of every form on your site from one screen, with a live preview that updates as you drag each control: eight colours, corner roundness, padding inside fields, spacing between them, maximum width, alignment, text size, label weight, an optional font, three field styles — outlined, underlined or filled — and four button styles, including full width, which tends to get the most taps on a phone.
No stylesheet editing and no fighting with your theme. And it is switched off until you turn it on, so updating changes nothing about how your forms look today.
Sell something without installing a shop
Any form can now carry a picture, a headline, a short description, a "what's included" bullet list and a note beside the price. Fill those in and a page containing nothing but the shortcode is a complete product page — no cart, no checkout plugin, no monthly fee.
Every one of those fields is optional. If your product page already carries the picture and the sales copy and just embeds the form at the bottom, leave the section blank and nothing changes at all.
Spam: mark it once, never hear from them again
If you are coming from 1.4.0, this part is new to you. Open a junk submission and click Spam. That sender's address is blocked for good and every submission it ever made is deleted. From then on they still see a normal thank-you message when they submit — nothing is stored, nobody is emailed, and no card is ever charged. They have no way to tell they were blocked, so they do not try to work around it.
The plugin then tells you which country that sender is in. If you also run PBJ Geo Viewer, one more click blocks that whole country, or just that one address. As always, there is no Google reCAPTCHA anywhere in this — the maths question, the hidden trap field and the speed check all run on your own server.
Upgrading
If your licence key is in place, the update appears in your WordPress dashboard as usual — Plugins, then Update. Your settings, forms and submissions are carried over automatically; the settings schema moves from 3 to 4 on first load and you do not need to do anything.
After updating, the sidebar entry changes from "Form Builder" to "PBJ Forms+". That is the only thing that moves.