Wishing you could create advanced forms on your website? Ever wonder how the professionals do it? You can do it yourself with this WordPress plugin and we’ll show you how.
We Prefer the Gravity Forms Plugin
It describes itself as a…
Contact Form Builder and Lead Data Management Plugin For WordPress
Uh yeah, to say the least. We have tried several contact form plugins and other solutions for WordPress and all had their benefits. Unfortunately we found ourselves having to customize each of these in one way or another.
We only use Gravity Forms (the developer version) for all of our projects now. There is just no other solution that offers so many features. I listed all the latest features on WP Modder not long ago.
We’ve created this tutorial to show you just how easy it is to create simple and advanced forms.
How to Install and Activate
After choosing the single or developer version of the plugin, you’ll gain access to download the .zip file to your local computer and receive an email with your license key (a long string of characters).
In your WordPress Dashboard, navigate to Plugins–>Add New and choose Upload. Select the .zip file you downloaded previously and choose upload. Now choose Activate, and you’re almost done.
Look for the new menu item of Forms. This is typically located after your Comments section but could be in a slightly different spot.
One last step. Navigate to Forms–>Settings and enter in your license key you received from Gravity Forms.
How to Create a Simple Contact Form
There are a few basic tools every website should have, and the most important by far is a simple contact form that provides a way for your visitors to contact you easily.
Watch us build a simple contact form in just minutes and place it on a page.
How to Create a File Upload Form
Need to allow your visitors to upload files to your site? Documents, audio files, even video files? It’s simple by using the File Upload option.
How to Create an Guest Author Submission Form
Accepting guest authors on your blog? Public users simply write their content and submit the form. This type of form gets submitted to you as a WordPress post with a Draft status. This method of managing guest articles means you don’t have to add users every time you accept a guest author on your site.
Add-ons for Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms also offers some indispensable Add-ons (and we use most of them). They are categorized as Basic and Advanced Add-ons.
Basic
- Campaign Monitor
- MailChimp
Advanced
- PayPal
- Freshbooks
- User Registration
- Twilio
Add-ons are only available to developer license holders here.
Gravity Forms Can Take You Further
Gravity Forms comes with too many features for us to show you in this one article. Some of these additional features include:
- Drop Down Menus: Create a selectable list of options.
- Checkboxes: Create as many checkboxes as you need.
- Multiple Choice: Create as many radio button choices as your form requires.
- Conditional Logic: Show any field only if a previous field is filled out a certain way.
- Advanced CSS Styling: Designers can completely customize every aspect of a form to match their designs.
- Page Breaks: Break a long form into multiple pages (users won’t have to scroll for miles).
- Pricing Fields: Pricing fields allow you to add fields to your form that calculate pricing for selling goods and services.
- …and so much more!
Real World Example
Want to see an example? Have a look at our submission form for joining our team. Notice how it matches our site design?
Hint: On that form, click the radio button seen in the image below to see some conditional formatting we’ve included.
