Blogging Tips

Gravity Forms – Premium WordPress Form Plugin

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club

RocketGenius have just launched a fantastic form plugin for WordPress called Gravity Forms. It allows you to easily create, manage and embed forms into your WordPress powered blog.

Here is a full list of the plugins features:

Easily Embed a Form into Posts & Pages
Create Autoresponder Emails to Users
Integrate with Other Plugins Using Hooks
View Entry Summaries from the WordPress Dashboard
Visually Create Forms with Our Sleek Editor
Prevent Spam with Built-In reCAPTCHA Protection
Allow Users to Automatically Create a Post
Manage Entries from the WordPress Admin Panel
Easily Export Form Entry Data to CSV Format

The plugin was developed by Carl Hancock, Alex Cancado and Kevin Flahaut from RocketGenius. I spoke to Carl today and he was more than happy to answer a few questions for you all. Enjoy

What encouraged you to develop a premium WordPress Form plugin?

We have a combined 30+ years experience building web sites, and one of the stumbling blocks we always encounter when building a site for a client are forms. Not only building the form, but managing the data and notifications that are generated as a result of the form being submitted.

We have been using WordPress as our CMS of choice for client site development but were completely unhappy with the available form solutions for WordPress so we decided to build our own.

Did you find any inspiration from the form plugins which are available in the WordPress plugin directory?

Our inspiration came more from hosted applications such as Wufoo, FormSpring, and Icebrrg. If we were inspired by any of the available solutions for WordPress we probably wouldn’t have built Gravity Forms. We are bringing the ease of use of hosted solutions such as FormSpring to the WordPress platform… without a monthly fee that is typically charged by the hosting solution.

How do the forms cope with spam?

Spam is a problem for any online form that can be accessed via a browser. Unfortunately, spammers are relentless. We chose to implement reCAPTCHA for spam protection. reCAPTCHA is a free captcha service from Carnegie Mellon University that helps protect your forms from spam and at the same time it helps to digitize old books and newspapers in the process.

Did you at any point consider releasing the plugin for free, or perhaps a free version with less features?

Months of planning, development and testing went into the creation of Gravity Forms. While we would love to give it away for free, the fact is we couldn’t continue developing or support the plugin if it was free. As time consuming as development is, providing high quality support is just as time consuming.

Have you ever used a WordPress plugin that you loved but the developer fell off the face of the earth, is no longer updating the plugin and it quit working with the latest version of WordPress? This is exactly what we don’t want to happen with Gravity Forms and why we chose to make it a commercial product.

What type of blogger do you think will be interested in purchasing a Gravity Form?

While Gravity Forms is very useful to just about any type of blogger, is is most useful for bloggers that need to easily handle user submitted data and businesses using WordPress as a CMS.

What new features can we expect to see in Gravity Forms in the future?

We have a long list of features we plan on adding to Gravity Forms.

Tighter integration with WordPress, integration with third party services such as Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, Freshbooks and Highrise; and payment processing integration for single page order forms are just some of the features we plan on introducing in the future.

Thanks to Carl for taking part in this interview.

Gravity Forms currently costs:

Single Site Support License = $39
Multi Site Support License (5 sites) = $99
Developer Support License (Unlimited sites) = $199

When you consider how important your blog contact form is to receiving information from potential customers, advertisers and fellow bloggers, $39 seems like a bargain for a plugin of this quality. If you have been looking for a good form plugin for your blog, I recommend checking Gravity Forms out.

You can find out more about this versatile plugin at Gravity Forms. Make sure you check out their tour video

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club
Posted on August 25th, 2009 and filed under WordPress Plugins
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