HTML forms go back to the very beginning, but in the beginning they were a nightmare. Over time various frameworks and abstractions developed to wrap the horrors of naked forms so that you only see the ugly parts when they need dealing with. At least in theory.

The Drupal form API is a highly sophisticated and powerful tool for building forms, but that comes at the price of being very complex. The dragons are buried deep, but sometimes what they're buried in doesn't seem any better. Is the form API easy to learn? No. Is it worth the effort? Come and find out for yourselves.

Over the course of the last few months I've had the opportunity to dive headfirst into the form API in a project which pushes the boundaries of what it can do. I'll share the blocks I've hit, the wonderful things I've discovered, and lay out a high level view of the form stack so that when things go wrong, you'll have a rough idea of where to start looking.