Eric Binnion

Gravity Forms is a form building plugin that simplifies the task of building attractive interactive forms for your WordPress websites. Sure, if you’re just looking for some basic contact form functionality, then there are several great contact form plugins out there for $0. But, if you’re looking for a contact form plugin that has extra features, such as:

• Submissions stored and viewable on WordPress Backend
• Multi-page forms
• Post Field
• Advanced fields for Name, Email, Address, etc.
• Drag-and-Drop form creation
• Create dynamic notifications using merge tags
• Ability to add custom logic through hooks
• Conditional logic to hide or show fields
• and MUCH MORE!

I can imagine and have seen or personally used Gravity forms to create:

• A quiz that would send a custom notification to the user based on the answers that were given.
• A multi-page application form that lets the user know how far they are in to the application process.
• A small e-commerce store that sells products, collects payment, and then delivers product

Now that you’re acquainted with some of the features of Gravity Forms, let me run you through the backend so you can see for yourself how easy and intuitive it is to create your own custom forms. This plugin really is a time-saving beast!

Above is a picture of the form builder within gravity forms. This is one of gravity forms biggest selling points, and why I recommend it so highly in this review. If you manage multiple websites or multiple forms on one website, then this is going to be a killer time-saving feature. You can simply click each box, the box will slide down with some extra options, and then you can choose between these options which include things such as custom logic, required field, or values.

Above is a screenshot of the gravity forms notifications builder. The notification builder allows you to create custom emails that are sent to either the website admin (or other appropriate persons) or the person who submitted the form. By customizing a submission notification we were able to create a quiz with a dynamic email that depended on what the user submitted in his questionnaire. Try doing that with a free plugin…

On top of some of these obvious features, gravity forms also allows you to advanced logic through accessing hooks and filters. An example of this would be to access the pre_submission hook in order to compute some response based on the user’s input. Another example would be writing some custom code to interface gravity forms with a 3rd-party service. This really expands gravity form’s functionality by essentially allowing you the ability to manipulate the submitted data however you need.

Bottom Line

It took a while for me to bite the bullet and drop the $199 for a developer’s license of Gravity Forms. But looking back, I am glad that I did. In the past few months alone I have used Gravity Forms on several websites, and have saved tons of time over having to write custom code from scratch. If you run any serious WordPress website, I highly recommend you get Gravity Forms.