Plugin: Gravity Forms

There are many free plugins you can use for adding all sorts of forms into your website, but none of them comes even close to the power and flexibility of Gravity Forms. Long list of features, great implementation, extensions and excellent support are worth paying for.

I am developing WordPress plugins for about 4 years, and most plugins I made are created because I didn’t like the alternatives (free or commercial). And for a while, I planned to make a forms plugin, because several I tried over the years were not very well made and I always had to work on them to get the features I need. But, things had change, and now we have Gravity Forms that is getting better with each new version, and I finally can scratch my plans to make forms plugin. Trust me, Gravity Forms is amazing.

With Gravity Forms you can add as many forms as you want. For each form you can see number of entries submitted and you can control each from notifications and fields in the layout. All submitted entries from website visitors are saved into the database, and you can review them and you can save notes about each one or respond the people that submitted them.

Edit the form is very intuitive, allowing you to set as many fields as you want. But, for each field you can set all sorts of options to control field behavior and display. Number of form fields you can use is quite extensive, and includes validation fields (for email, or phone), hidden fields to embed all sorts of runtime variables (logged in user for example, or date, post ID or link…).

But, that’s not all, Gravity Forms has add-ons. Currently, there are 6 add-ons available. 5 of them will help you integrating plugin with Campaign Monitor email marketing service, MailChimp email marketing service, FreshBooks invoicing service, Twillo for SMS notifications and PayPal. Sixth add-on is for expanding default WordPress registration form and replacing it with form made using Gravity Forms so you can gather more info about the user during registration process.

Plugin includes default styling, but that can be changed and expanded so that you can give it better look for the theme you are using. All my xScape based themes all have custom styling for Gravity Forms so that they can get more native look inside the theme pages. Also, with numerous hooks inside the Gravity Forms, you can expand it and add own fields, values for fields and many more things.

Here, on Dev4Press, I use Gravity Forms for 6 different contact forms for the past 2 months, and it really made my life easier handling different contact submissions and responding to them. Forms are very flexible and so far, I only used hooks to add items into some of the selection fields, everything else is done with Gravity Forms alone.

If you decide on purchase, there are 3 different licenses you can get: personal (for 1 website with no add-ons), business (3 websites and basic add-ons) and developer (unlimited number of websites and all add-ons with priority support). All 3 include one year of updates and support. Whatever license you decide on, getting Gravity Forms will very much improve your WordPress powered website. Highly recommended.