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Forms are often a necessary part of the website creation process.

That doesn’t mean that they’re easy to build, of course. They can be. But not always.

Maybe they need some fancy features, like conditional logic or calculations, in order to work the way you want. Or maybe they’re just ugly and you’re not sure how to “pretty” them up.

If you’re not a web developer or designer, but you’re still building forms yourself, it might feel intimidating to tackle the complexities of form building.

This is doubly true if you have questions about the form-building process.

What are the best tools for form building? How many forms fields do you need? What happens after someone submits a form? What does a good form landing page look like?

The good news is that you don’t have to be a web developer or designer to build functional, optimized web forms. You just need a few answers to your questions.

With that in mind, here is a simple guide to building web forms in WordPress (even if you’re not totally WordPress-savvy).

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If you gave a set of the same building blocks to 10 different people, you’d most likely end up with vastly different results.

The same is true of WordPress plugins.

Give 10 developers the same access to Gravity Forms, for example, and you’ll get 10 different forms. But that’s sort of how we want it to be.

Gravity Forms gives you the building blocks to create almost any type of form you could think of, and there are some pretty cool things that developers have done when given free reign.

With that in mind, here are 5 examples of cool forms that use Gravity Forms as a foundation.

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If you frequently handle user-submitted file uploads on your WordPress site, you'll likely want to place them on a cloud storage provider like Google Drive. By sending your file uploads to a cloud storage provider such as Google Drive, you will not only have a backup in the event of a disaster, but your web host will likely be much happier with them off of your server. In this article, we'll show you how to easily send any file uploads from your WordPress form directly to Google Drive.

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If you have a form, you’ll get spam. That’s the inevitable truth.

So you need a way to block spammers from flooding your form submissions.

Up until a few years ago, the accepted anti-spam device was CAPTCHA — a program designed to protect against spambots by generating tests that only humans could pass.

The idea was to create a system that was nearly impossible for bots to fill in your form. It wasn’t a perfect system by any means, but for years it was all we had to add any level of security to our devices.

Recently, however, Google declared the death of CAPTCHA.

Bots were getting too smart for it to work as intended, and humans were getting too annoyed with the process to keep it around.

But with its passing, there leaves a big gap in form security. So what's left to replace it?

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Part of what makes Gravity Forms the top choice in WordPress form plugins is our extensive developer community, whose devotion and hard work producing top-notch Gravity Forms add-ons enriches the utility of our own product in ways we never imagined. We want to help our ingenious users find your amazing add-ons!

What We're Working On

In the coming weeks, we'll be launching a brand new section of the site to highlight developers like you and the add-ons you produce. From this area users will be able to browse or search a directory of third party add-ons, see a little bit of detail about the add-on, as well as some information on the developers behind them. If a user then wants more information, or to download or purchase, we will send them directly to your website so you can ensure that all necessary information is presented just as you intended.

We hope that these changes will not only allow developers everywhere to bring new attention to their Gravity Forms add-ons, but also help our users better identify high-quality add-ons to fit their needs.

Want In?

If you want to get a jump-start and be among the third party Gravity Forms add-ons that are listed at launch, we are now accepting applications. We need information about you and your plug-ins, so submit via our add-on submission page. We will be reviewing all submissions in the coming weeks, and will reach out to you if we have any questions. You can submit once for every add-on you wish to be featured. We want to include as many add-ons as possible, but the final verdict on what is included and what is not will be solely at our discretion. So use common sense and good language.

We look forward to featuring your amazing work!

 

Do you need to schedule events using forms on your WordPress site but don't want to manually view entries to add them to Google Calendar? In this article, we'll outline how to automatically send your form entries directly to Google Calendar using Gravity Forms and Zapier.

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Gravity Forms v2.3 Release Candidate 5 is now available via the downloads page. It is only available via automatic update if you have previously installed a Gravity Forms v2.3 Beta or Release Candidate. Version 2.3 is a feature release that includes a variety of enhancements and improvements. A complete rundown of the features, enhancements, and changes can be found below. Now is the time for 3rd party developers and customers who have implemented customizations that may be impacted by these changes to be testing and readying changes in preparation for the final release of Gravity Forms v2.3 via automatic update. show more

Gravity Forms v2.2.6 is now available via automatic update and the downloads page.

This is an important maintenance update that includes security enhancements, bug fixes, new hooks and more importantly implements changes that will help sites prepare for the upcoming release of Gravity Forms v2.3.

We recommend users update as soon as possible in order to keep your WordPress site up to date with the latest bug fixes and security enhancements.

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Any type of web design can be expensive, even if you’re just trying to do something simple.

With the rise of drag-and-drop website builders and other DIY design tools, however, some of those costs can be cut significantly.

But what about form design?

You would think that form design would be easy, and in some ways, it is. We help thousands of people design their own forms every day, after all.

But we also field a lot of questions about forms from website owners and developers trying to sort out the nitty gritty details themselves.

The harsh truth is that sometimes the form development process can be drawn out and, frankly, pricey, especially if you’re hiring a developer to do things for you.

How pricey, exactly? Well, it all depends on your approach.

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Previously, we wrote about how you could send your form entries to Google Sheets. While inserting new data for each entry is as far as it needs to go for most users, you might need to continuously update the spreadsheet. With just a bit of additional logic, you can easily use Gravity Forms to find existing rows and update them as needed.

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