Andreas Jung: Privacy Forms Studio: Next-Generation Forms in Plone: Privacy-First, Secure, and Powered by SurveyJS
Presentation at Plone Conference 2026
Forms are everywhere, and most of them are terrible.
Personal mission: make forms boringly reliable. And prevent Germany from reinventing the fax as a web app.
Disclaimer 1: I am an official SurveyJS partner.
Disclaimer 2: Everything here is basically AI slop. The architecture comes from my side, but I did not write a single line of code.
Demo site: https://demo.privacyforms.studio
Plone has had several form add-ons:
- ATSchemeEditorNG
- PloneFormGen
- collective.easyform
- Volto Form Block
Motivation for Privacy Forms Studio: digital sovereignty (EU-driven compliance), complex requirements (beautiful forms, conditional logic), AI capabilities.
Some features:
- It has a visual designer with intuitive drag and drop.
- Upload a PDF and extract a form from it.
- conditional logic
- privacy-first
It is powered by the SurveyJS engine. It has a licensing model. The viewer is completely free. The forms creator is 500-800 euro per developer, one-time.
The foundational pipeline: json -> form creator -> browser.
You can have open URLs to the form, or a token link, specific to one user. It has a strong validation pipeline in the backend, protecting against malicious submissions. There is an audit trail for submissions.
So a form is submitted, what do you do with the data?
- Store it, in Plone or a relational database.
- Email it.
- Send a light-weight notification mail with only a link, for better confidentiality.
- Post: forward it to an external HTTP endpoint
AI assistance is possible, but optional: zero AI by default. Draft a form from a simple text description. Upload a PDF, and AI extracts fields, types, and structure automatically. There is a chatbot assistant. You can use local or remote models.
It can be installed as add-on in Plone. For larger applications you would add a relational database to store the submissions, good for large amounts of submissions.
Maybe you already have a fillable PDF. We can do a roundtrip for this. Upload the PDF so we extract a form for it. The visitor submits the form. Then we fill in the answers in the original fillable PDF, so it can be handled as previously. Technically: we validate and extract with pypdf, then write values back with PyMuPDF.
Which license does this AI-generated code have? I don't care about that right now, but it is on GitHub, you can use it.
Conclusions:
- This is a professional and decent solution for Plone.
- SurveyJS at 500 euro per integrator, so pretty affordable for projects.
- Great for digital and data sovereignty.
- Optional AI
- Full control over data and processing.