Gravity Forms. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. It is a premium WordPress plug-in which allows you to create forms for your blog.
Gravity Forms was on my “someday maybe” list for awhile. I checked this site out and thought, “Hmmm…. that could be cool. Their website sure is purty.” 
Then, a couple weeks ago, I went ahead and picked up a copy and gave it a whirl.
So, the question is, why bother with a premium WordPress plug-in to do forms when there are a bunch of freebies like Contact Form 7 out there?
How Gravity Forms Is Much Better Than The Freebies
As is often the case, when you pony up a little scratch for something, you get better stuff. And Gravity Forms isn’t an exception. I’m going to compare Gravity Forms with Contact Form 7 (what I was using beforehand).
- The design is SO much better. Both the admin side and the forms themselves are much better looking.
- The forms can interact directly with your post system, allowing people to submit forms as posts.
- In addition to email notifications, you can have form submissions listed right inside of the admin panel. So much more organized.
- Forms can contain conditional logic.
- Forms are added right into the post/page editor, so you can literally stick forms anywhere you want without any copy/paste stuff.
- It comes with a widget, for easily putting forms right into your sidebar.
- You can schedule forms.
- Built in Re-Captcha support (which beats the crap out of the captcha support built into Contact Form 7)
- Need I go on?
It really is a killer plug-in.
But, perhaps you’re thinking, who cares? All you need is a simple contact form, right? Well, let me give you some interesting uses for Gravity Forms.
6 (Of Many) Uses For Gravity Forms
- Contact form. Pretty obvious, but it had to be said anyway.
- Automate guest post submission. Typically, you get guest posts emailed to you. Then, you have to manually copy/paste it into a post. It is a big bunch of sucky sauce. With Gravity Forms, you can set up posts which submit directly as posts. Check out my form for guest posts on PCMech (opens in new window). I can allow people to enter all kinds of things (even the post category), and have it go into draft and notify me. Then, all I have to do is check out the post. If I like it, publish it. Otherwise, delete it. It really helps streamline the whole thing (and expect me to set this up here on this site soon, too). It’ll save Lisa some work, too.
- Take contest entries. Super easy to do, but get this…. with the scheduling feature, you can impose hard deadlines on your contests without having to do a thing. You can also limit the number of entries.
- Pre-qualify leads. Getting people to apply for something is an interesting psychological tactic in marketing. Not only can you limit the number, but schedule it and everything. Did I mention you can also send an auto-reply to the person submitting the form as an acknowledgement? Cool, huh?
- Contextual Form Placement? How about having a blog post about something you’re doing, and putting a form right smack into the post?! Now, THAT’S a call to action!
- Member Forms. Gravity Forms can pre-fill fields like name and email address based on a person’s profile in WordPress. So, if you run a WP-powered membership site, this makes an awesome form solution while minimizing work required by your members.
The uses for this are many, and really up to your imagination. Most people underuse plug-ins like this when they equate it to contact forms. There is SO much more potential to it.
So much so, that I picked up the multi-site license. I use WordPress for pretty much everything and I have some pretty interesting uses for Gravity Forms in mind for those sites, too.
I’m happy I made the purchase, and you will be, too. ‘Nuf said. Click here to check out their “purty” website and pick up a copy for yourself.
David has been blogging for 15 years, and generating a six-figure income at it for the last 12. He is the founder of Blog Marketing Academy. 
David Risley has been building and operating authority blogs for 15 years, and operating a six-figure business doing it for a decade.
Sweet post David! I’ve been looking for a way to streamline many of the items you’ve listed above, especially guest posting. I always love a good tip that helps streamline my blog processes and integrates well.
Thanks again!
I hear a lot about these guys, and if their website is any indication (it usually is), the plugin rocks.
It would be good to have Gravity Forms and Aweber Integration. Looks like they support only MailChimp (for now).
That’s (relatively) easy to pull off, tho. Mailchimp has a direct API, while Aweber does not (yet). But, you can have Gravity send emails off to your Aweber list address, then set up a parser, and you’ll get it to work. Not as direct, but it would get the job done.
I purchased Gravity Forms after the free app (CForms II, I believe) I was using stopped working. I found it to be very easy to set up and it produces great-looking, easy to maintain, well-behaved forms. Thanks for illuminating these addition uses of it!
I gotta give it up to the plugin also. Worth every penny. I use it for lead capture information but you just gave me a few awesome ideas to use it for in posts.
Kickass dude. I highly recommend the plugin. Easy to use as well.
Sounds like a great plug-in, and it is also a gorgeous website. I’ve wanted to design a ‘mac; type site like that I just don’t have a product that suits it.
Hmmm – you have my brain churning of where to implement some of these great features.
Not having had time to look very far into the plugin – do you know if it be integrated with some sort of simple payment system (e.g. PayPal)? Looking for a simple solution for a small organization to take activity and membership registrations.
Thanks for the review, David.
paul
Probably looking for something more like Wishlist Member, but not sure.
With Gravity, I believe you can give it a URL to send the user to after submitting the form, which might be a way to send them directly into Paypal after submission. Might be a way to do that.
Wishlist Member is said to be working on Gravity Form integration, too.
Appreciate the additional info, David.
As David Wang notes above, PayPal connectivity may be coming as a plugin, so I’ll have a look into that too.
P.
One thing I didn’t see on your list was a form to collect secure infomation. Does it do that? Can WordPress even do Secure forms?
Not really, no. You could easily make it use the https protocol, but that doesn’t necessarily make it secure, since the data goes into the database unencrypted, etc. So, no, it isn’t really designed for that one. Nothing that ties into WordPress as a plug-in would be, really.
I bought a developer’s license and use their plugin extensively. David you didn’t mention the add-ons that are available. For example, you can integrate Gravity Forms with MailChimp and CampaignMonitor so that when someone submits the contact form they can automatically be added to your list.
Regarding PayPal integration, it’s a feature that is in the works and should be available as another add-on.
Thanks for the note on potential upcoming PayPal integration, David.
P.
This is a very interesting plug-in. I like it that Gravity Forms can allow users to submit posts with the forms. I’m sure a very clever person would find good use for that in the blogosphere.
Thanks, David.