Something I have been waiting for since I first used WordPress was a better way of managing user submitted data. Contact forms have always been horrible, and worked randomly, depending on the theme, other plugins and what sometimes felt like the roll of the dice. Gravity Forms is the perfect replacement for all of those horrible issue laden plugins.
I've been beta testing the plugin for some time now, and have found it useful for a variety of different needs, and the more I use it, the more ideas I come up with on what it could do for me with regards to taking in information from visitors and displaying it to me.
The first thought that people have is that Gravity Forms is "just another Contact Form plugin", but it can do so much more than that.
Want to do a visitor survey? Want to do a "send this post to a friend"? Want to have user guest post submissions? Gravity Forms can do all of that and more. I've even used it for a basic product inventory system, as well as a tool to sign players up for an online RPG. The uses for the plugin are wide, and according to the Rocket Genius team, they'll continue to expand.
Gravity Forms is a premium plugin, but I like to call it the first "extension" of WordPress, because I feel like marketing it as a plugin is too limiting. It does so much more. There are three price points for Gravity Forms, $39 gets you a one-site personal license, $99 gets you a five site license, and $199 gets you the unlimited developer license.
The Developer license comes with Priority Support and Free Add-Ons and allows you to install it on as many sites as you want. This is the license I will be purchasing, and the one I hope you'll all purchase as well.
Why go for the Developer License?
It might seem pretty pricey to shell out nearly two-hundred dollars for a WordPress plugin, but I assure you, there is more than two hundred dollars in value that you'll receive. If not from the initial 1.0 version, then from future version, the free add-ons and the priority support.
What other plugin will allow you to quickly and easily make contact forms on all of your blogs? What other plugin will make it easy for you to take feedback, guest posts and other information from your users? What other plugin will allow you to make a basic help-desk? We are just scratching the surface of the types of input and data management this plugin will allow, and you'd be silly not to try to take full advantage of what Gravity Forms is offering you.
Affiliate Offer
Yes, the links in my post are affiliate links, and you too could sign up, receiving a 20% commission on any sales you generate. I think this is very fair, and look forward to hearing from the Rocket Genius team how this does for them.
Follow the Rocket Genius Team on Twitter
If you are like me, and want to keep up to date on everything happening with Gravity Forms, make sure to jump on Twitter, and follow the following people:
Don't forget to check your server first to make sure Gravity Forms will work on it. Use their Gravity Forms Server Test plugin to double check, or just make sure your server is using WordPress 2.8+, MySQL 5+ and PHP 5+.
I have always found WordPress to be lacking a theme that gave a full set of tools to the user, making sure they could customize their blog in an effective way without any PHP, xhtml or CSS knowledge.