Branding David

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:

• Rocket Genius
• Kevin Flahaut
• Carl Hancock

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+.

If you couldn’t tell from my resurgence of posts on this blog, I have Internet access again at my new apartment.

I had to go with Eastlink, apparently a well know ISP in the east coast of Canada.

I was hoping to go with Rogers, but they don’t service this area, since it is too sparsely populated I assume. While the cost is fairly comparable, the speed is about half of what I am used to. The technicians came and set it up fairly quickly and were nice. The support personnel on the phone have also been very nice.

Honestly though, I am just glad to have Internet where I live again. Working from coffee shops and whatnot isn’t ideal.

If you live in Bruce County, Ontario and are looking for a decent ISP, check out Eastlink. So far they get my vote, despite the crummy install timeline.

Previously, I posted the update to the original post, but I think everything that has happened since deserves another post to itself. Read the original post entitled “Frustration With Dell” for more details surrounding my issues.

After using Twitter to contact Lionel Menchaca, the chief blogger for Dell, as well as someone I’ve run into a few times at various new media/blogging related events, I was told he would contact someone in Canada to help me get this resolved. Without Lionel and others like him in Dell, I fear the company would long since have died.

Lionel wasn’t able to quickly contact someone in Canada, and I waited patiently for almost a month, messaging him on Twitter nearly every week for any status update.

Eventually, I received a call at home when I wasn’t there. Sunny Sharma then e-mailed me to let me know that they tried to get in contact with me via the phone.

Here is the full text of that e-mail.

Dear Mr. David Peralty,

This is in reference to your email received at Dell. First of all, I would like to thank you for taking time to make us aware of this issue, Also I apologise for the inconvenience you had to go through in this regards. I tried calling you today to discuss the issue and as you were not available I left a voice mail for you. Please provide me with the alternate contact # and so that we can discuss this issue. I can also be reached at the number mentioned below.

Regards,
Sunny Sharma

Ph: 1-800-387-5757, Options 1,1&2 Ext 53 – 75193
Working Hrs : Mon to Fri (9:00am to 6:00pm EST)

Finally, I might have someone that can help me resolve this whole mess. Since this whole thing began, the issues my wife has been complaining about for months have worsened. The screen issue that I originally sent the unit in for comes back from time to time, especially when opening or closing the unit, and when you rest your palms on the area below the keyboard, it causes strange things to happen when you are typing, as I mentioned in my previous post.

The computer has also become very finicky about wireless Internet connections. Overall, the angry comments from my wife have been getting worse, and my own use of the machine has caused numerous explicit words to be shouted.

I feel like we were sold a lemon, and thus far the support has pretty much ignored us, only making the situation worse and souring us on the brand.

I am looking forward to seeing what Sunny has to say about the whole thing, but I am worried I will be dealing with another technician that will think I am just another customer with a bad case of PEBKAC.

Someone mentioned to me recently that it is pretty shameful that I have to contact specific people within Dell to get a reasonable response to my problem, and to them, I just want to say that the only way to get a potentially satisfactory resolution as a customer when you are unhappy is to hound a company until they either give you the answer you are looking for, or teach you to never be a customer of theirs again.