Put each fieldgroup in its own tab on the form

extremely long forms are not very useful, that's right. why don't you split your form into various content types? with the help of pageroute modul you are capable to melt it together and have your form splitted in pages with tabs and navigation buttons.

and if you want all variables available in the template of one content type try the nodefamily module.

You can now use the fieldgroup module to help organize fields on a page. Plus, as the earlier comment noted, if you have a huge amount of data it might make sense to break it down into more than one content type.

It might be interesting to adapt fieldgroup so that each group can have its own tab in the form. This would only be realistically doable in 5.x, which has added support for multi-page forms, so I'm re-working this into a feature request for fieldgroup in 5.x.

I already submitted a similar feature request, on the original field groups module issue page, though it does not look like it was moved over to cck's issue queue.
My request was for the HEAD version of field group, and was based on outputting field groups, as tabbed based pages, menus, and or blocks. Some other things I noted, are that the field group names could become the tab titles, blocks titles, etc, and settings such as, open and expanded by default, could be applied to both menus and blocks.

Hear is another feature request issue that I had also based my original feature request on….
"Add output grouping that matches impute grouping" - http://drupal.org/node/85679
Fago wrote: for 5.x this should be doable as part of the module

I am thinking about doing a write up for this and a few other ideas I have, using the Views reference field module, blocks module, and a content relationship field type module, as a good approach for relationship linking and structuring in Drupal, which I will post on drupal groups, later this week.

Bumping this up, as there seams to be a lot of field group related features and fixes going on, and it would be really grate to see some multi tabbed paging stuff implemented along the way.

Thanks for all your hard work KarenS and Yched

Thought it was worth noting I've been using this module without problems for a couple of days. It turns the regular fieldsets into javascript-y tabs.

http://drupal.org/project/cck_fieldgroup_tabs

None of the salespeople like it, but they would be interested in something where the CCK form is broken up between multiple pages. I pictured a pageroute-like feature, except it all ends up in the same CCK node. That's a different picture than the tabs (which have already been implemented in the aforementioned link).

Well it probably won't go in 5.x, maybe in 6.x. It isn't in the list of things we're trying to get into the initial D6 release, but could be addressed later.

I might dive in and try to patch fieldgroup to seperate forms into multipage forms. Can anyone think of any hurdles I might run into? Anyone interested in helping out with funding it?