FourTen Creative Blog

Every WordPress developer has a love-hate relationship with plugins. When you first discover WordPress, you love the seemingly limitless development possibilities due to the limitless number of WordPress plugins you are free to integrate into your projects. Then your first major WP upgrade or major plugin conflict breaks your site and you’re left looking for a new plugin to replace the offender.

The marketplace for paid WordPress plugins has exploded over the past few years as well, leaving some developers wondering which plugins are worth paying for and which free ones are worth the risk integrating into your websites. Gravity Forms was the first plugin I paid for and the first I integrate into every project.

Why? What set it apart from other contact form options at first was the ability to store form entries in your database and not leave delivery of information up to the smtp gods (who sometimes get very angry, especially over at godaddy). The other reason was the ajax powered user interface for easily building new forms. This was ideal for my clients who shouldn’t have to learn a bit of code to work with a website I deliver.

Well that was a long intro… on to the story.

The release of Gravity forms 1.5 has upped the ante for creative uses for this valuable plugin. Below are just a few ways I’m using this plugin. I’m sure there are way more better uses out there I haven’t thought of, but I wanted to provide some ideas for people to see the possibilities of what they can do with WordPress (free) and one paid plugin.

 

Gravity Forms as a Custom Evite

With the new release you can utilize the email notification feature to produce and email created by and sent by your website visitors. Think of it as a custom evite. This is accomplished by a user defined email address in the from AND to fields. Then, you can produce html for a custom email layout and you have your very own invitation engine. WARNING! You also have a wide open spam engine if you don’t control access to the page. You’ve been warned.

 

Gravity Forms as a Flexible Donation Portal for Non-Profits

With the new pricing fields and the PayPal add on (available to developer license holders), you can easily accept donations for your non-profit. Yes, you can also sell items, but many of my clients need a more flexible method of gathering data with PayPal donations without setting up a shopping cart. I also use the gravity forms feature (available in previous releases) to pre-populate fields for information such as account numbers which the user is unlikely to have or remember to enter correctly.

Just add the field name and value in the url when linking to the page with your form like so:

http://www.websitename.org/donate/?fieldname=fieldvalue

 

Gravity Forms as a Registration Module

The hardest thing for some of my clients has been the collection of payment and data in the same process. This is usually a registration process which can be easily handled by Gravity Forms with the above mentioned PayPal integration. Due to the advanced data collection fields with Gravity Forms, I can now provide much richer, easy to maintain registration modules for businesses and non-profits.

They are also offering a user registration add on specifically for registering user with your wordpress website. This is great for pay-for-content or organizational membership models.

 

Gravity Forms as a Portal for User Generated Content

User-generated content make the web go round…and Gravity Forms has offered post fields for the automatic creation of post within WordPress in previous versions. With version 1.5, better category control and post field options have been implemented to offer better control over your user submitted content.

There are other plugins out there to enhance the functionality of Gravity Forms like the Gravity Forms Directory & Addons plugin which can turn a WordPress website and Gravity Forms into an business listing SEO powerhouse.

 

Check out Gravity Forms or read details on the latest release or contact us to see how FourTen can rock a WP/Gravity Forms enabled site for you!

 

Update 7-6-11: More fancy tricks with Gravity forms

Integrate Gravity Forms with Salesforce Web2Lead Code

Props to seobywebmechanix.com for their article detailing the process of making your gravity form send data to Salesforce, offering one more power function to this awesome plugin.

 

Clear Default Fields on Click

Thanks to Kevin at Gravity Forms for detailing a solution to making your default form fields clear on click. You just need to add some javascript to your head and customize your css to hide labels, etc.

Wordpress upgrades are always welcome and bring with them more and more options for extended functionality and ease of use. And WordPress 3.1 is no exception. You can read about the new features here, but I am just going to throw out the burning question for many theme developers – how to get rid of that admin bar.

In my case, I developed a custom admin bar for my templates which is overlaid by the new WordPress admin bar. To disable the admin bar, simply visit your user profile in the WordPress admin area under Users/My Profile. Uncheck the boxes next to Show Admin Bar.

For theme developers, you can also disable the admin bar in the functions.php file by adding the following:

/* Disable the Admin Bar By Default */

add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );

/* Remove the Admin Bar preference in user profile to remove temptation... */
remove_action( 'personal_options', '_admin_bar_preferences' );

And of course, there is always a plugin out there ready to do the work for you with the Disable Admin Bar plugin.

Happy upgrading!

Thanks to summerchilde in the support forum for a better code snippet.