Roadmap: Conditional Forms, New Interface, and the Future

As part of our Roadmap blog series, I’d like to share what is keeping our development team busy these days. Currently, we are working on two releases simultaneously.

Small Feature Release

A small release will be going live in October. This upgrade is primarily dedicated to conditional forms, a highly requested feature by our customers. It allows you to show/hide fields or make them required based on values of other fields. We have built this feature in a way that will provide plenty of flexibility.

Progress on a Major UI Release

There is also a much bigger release in the works for a while now. It achieves two major goals for us. One is to completely refresh the user interface of the Caspio administrative console, and the other to lay the foundation for some fantastic new features that will be rolled out soon after. At the same time, it packs many smaller features here and there to make your apps more powerful.

The overall Caspio user interface has been left mostly unchanged since Caspio started. Back then we decided to mimic traditional desktop database software because most of our users were already familiar with them. Our goal was to reduce the learning curve as much as possible. However, a lot has progressed in the past decade and people are now very comfortable working with web user interfaces that don’t resemble the desktop. At the same time, people increasingly use tablets and other mobile devices for work.

Our new user interface is a complete departure from the past and aims to be easier to use and more compatible with the latest best practices in user experience and cross-platform delivery.

Changing the user interface entirely has been a monumental task, but we are thrilled to see how nicely things are coming together. As we get closer to the release, we will share more details.

Future Roadmap

Beyond these next couple of releases, we have two main objectives in our upcoming roadmap. The first is to begin exposing and leveraging the capabilities of our new platform upgrade. We cannot discuss the details yet for competitive reasons, but they are very exciting. Second, we plan to begin a focused effort to implement the top-rated features requested by our customers in the Caspio Ideabox. Be sure to enter your own ideas and vote for the ones that you like. These ideas will be a major driver of our future development work.

We are also busy expanding our product team hiring additional engineers and product managers.

In the past we remained mum about our roadmap, but we are now experimenting with sharing what’s happening at Caspio much more openly. We like this approach a lot, but are still a little uneasy about over-promising release dates or prematurely divulging evolving ideas. So please bear with us as we get more comfortable sharing our roadmap and don’t hesitate give us your feedback.