I haven't talked half as much about Gravity Forms as I should. It's still my number one lifesaving plugin, and in the latest release they've done loads and loads of cool things. One of the things I've been meaning to show off is the MailChimp integration. My newsletter is sent out with MailChimp and they've been a sponsor of my blog and newsletter for quite a while now and, well, simply put, I love them. Ow yeah and below I've also got an updated version of the Gravity Forms widget for you, keep on reading!
What happens now is that when you send me an email through my contact form, you've got an option to subscribe to my newsletter, if you check that, you'll receive an opt-in email to subscribe to my newsletter and ta-daa: you're subscribed! Best thing about it? That whole process took about 5 minutes to setup:
- Downloading the MailChimp add-on from the Gravity Forms support site
- Entering my MailChimp account details in the backend
- Selecting the proper list from a dropdown, selecting the proper form from my dropdown
- Matching the fields and setting the optional "Opt-in condition"
It looks like this:
Pretty nifty stuff huh? (You'll need a developer license for this add-on btw, just so you know.)
Gravity Forms Widget
My Gravity Forms Widget also has had several updates over the last months to fix some bugs here and there, such as tabindex issues and issues with other plugins colliding into the form. The widget interface now looks like is shown below. You can download the latest version here. To use it just upload it to your plugins folder and activate it.
It seems Gravity Forms upcoming version 1.4 is going to be awesome yet again, so if you haven't yet, you really should get on this bandwagon and start using it. It rocks. If you want to read more, you might want to read about or listen to Gravity Forms on Press This (when our podcast was still called that way).
Though I haven't used Gravity Forms - I've been reading up on it. It looks very promising and from your review - I may give it a shot. Thanks for the post.
It is very promising, and it doesn't only promise, it delivers too, so I can only urge you to go get it ;)
same here! thanks.
Hi,
I have Gravity Forms in all my websites.........it's a GREAT plugin and woth the money spent.
Thanks very much for this widget!!!!
My pleasure Raoni, my pleasure entirely!
Awesome! I use cforms but this is the first time I've seen a good reason to switch to gravity forms... super cool!
There are quite a few more reasons, but I'm glad you found this one ;)
I use cforms too, but the Mails "end up" in your Mailbox. Now what? Not really executable for marketers. What about asking for a newsletter to People posting a coment? Seems obvious to me is it possible? One of your Podcasts you talked about à Ticket System could you post the Link again?
Well for me it is: if they email me anyway, I might as well subscribe them. You're right about the comment form, I was talking about that exact thing with Alex, the lead developer for Gravity Forms, last night, it is possible to add this with a checkbox to the comment form too, heck, I might even build it ;)
Another gravity form fan here!
I have been using the MailChimp add-on and it works like a charm. No more mucking about with APIs :)
Exactly, loving it too ;)
Joost,
Yet another "I totally agree with your Gravity Froms fanship"-fan here :-)
Will try and implement the MailChimp integration asap with one of my clients...
Thnx & CU!
Cool Bart :) just noticed permalinks on your site are dead btw...
I would say 'my site is dead', or 'is in a perma(nent)-pregnancy phase' ;-)
Thanks for the great add-on to the even greater Gravity Forms plugin. A must have plugin for custom theme design & development.
Joost, I installed the plug-in, but got this error message:
The plugin does not have a valid header.
Please advise, and thank you!
Doug Arnold in Mansfield, MA USA
I use Network Solutions as host and am running 2.9.2 using Genesis/Platinum.
Did you upload actually succeed? it's working nicely here, and that's the kind of error you'd get for a broken file...
Joost, yes, it says the plug-in loaded successfully; but, I still get the error message about the plug-in not having a valid header. I could send you screenshots but I don't see how to send attachments to you here.
Thanks, Doug
Joost,
My prior request was about the Gravity Forms (Widget) update; also just wanted to mention that I'm a registered user of Gravity Forms.
Doug Arnold
Couldn't agree more with the Gravity Forms love. Nice to see the benchmark set so high for premium WP plugins. I don't mind paying if they're this good.
Also, the support is second to none - I've never known a support service to reply so fast - I hope they can keep it up as the plugin gets more popular (which it surely will).
Would love to see them implement a way to use G Forms to handle custom fields in the admin pages.
I've never used gravity forms before, what do they do? Sounds like it has plenty of fans! lol
I was not too sure about paying For Gravity Forms, since the myriad of other form plugins seemed to be good enough, now there is no going back.
Each client eats it up, simple to use - no code for clients to mess with if they need a new form, it is a no brainer.
We've just figured out how to make Gravity Forms post to CRMs at the same time that they feed into MailChimp. Basically, after completing the GF the redirection goes to a "hidden" page with the CRM form on it which auto-submits the data. The GF contains a "hidden" field with the CRM account owners' unique ID number.
As an example, on our real estate website visitors can request a "Home Value Estimate." Well they fill out the GF which dumps the data into MailChimp, goes through a hidden "Altos Research" form so they'll receive an emailed Market Report, dumps into the WiseAgent CRM, and then directly inserts the data into a Zillow Address field for an instant online estimate. The only limitation is really based on the types/number of fields that are used by the CRM. Cool huh? : )
Yoast, do you or do you know anyone who has integrated GF with CRMs this or any other way? It seems to be a critical missing link.
great wp help on c forms :) is that for the new wp release :)
Thanks Yoast - I've used MailChimp with a couple of clients who just needed an effective free option but everything seems to integrate natively with Aweber and getting it to work with MailChimp takes hacking - I'll have a look at this though definitely a cool option for small businesses to engage their customers.
As it sounds very promising will try this one on a client site, he has a product to sell. Does it supoort other languages too ?
Thanks Yoast !
Bad grammar, sorry, it is "support"
Thanks Yoast! Always looking for ways to streamline my biz - this will definitely help as I am a very happy MailChimp customer!
Many thanks for posting this!
I bought gravity forms after reading on your blog several months ago and yes it rocks!
I have been looking at mail chimp, but worried about switching my list over. Will look at this plugin widget.
BTW, Yoast rocks too! :)
We we bought gravity forms developer edition last week... fantastic! Was able to build some chunky forms easily and love the mail chimp plugin. Was a bit odd though that they didn't have it widgitised... And yes - we did utilise your widget solution - thanks Yoast.
Great to hear that Heidi! Had to look twice because I thought I recognized the face and name, but yeah it was the two of you at WordCamp Ireland wasn't it? :)
I've been considering switching to Gravity for a while and now with the MailChimp integration and your widget it is even more tempting.
The only obstacle, and I have posted a question on the forum, is my desire to migrate away from the traditional formatting to the "Mad Lib" style that Luke Wroblewski talks about in his blog.
Thank you Joost for another great post.
Reading through that article and liking the idea a lot - i took a stab at modding Gforms and Yoast's widget output, and came up with an easy to implement winner - that will be popping up on a few future sites.
I have been using gravity forms for a little bit on some of my other sites and I really like it. Good quality form to use with good customization opportunities.
Hey Joost,
Thanks for the widget, definitely saved me some time!
The only issue I have is that it does not save my preferences for showing the title and description, as soon as I click Save it clears the checkboxes. And by default, the description is shown, regardless of what is checked off, so in order to have no description I had to clear out the description from my form in Gravity.
I'm on WP 2.9.2, Gravity Forms 1.3.11.
You may want to update this post as well: http://yoast.com/gravity-forms-widget-extras/
Cheers!
Okay, so it IS saving the preferences, but the checkboxes still don't match up. :)
Hello Joost, thank you very much for the widget! We have just starting using Gravatar Forms in all our projects and we are very happy about how easy and fast is to set up very complete forms. Thank you!
I also got an invalid header message. it uploaded fine, but I got that message when I activated it. Any suggestions?
Hey Joost!
Like Moshe I'm getting the invalid header message for this widget. Any updates on why this is happening with 2.9.2?
Thanks a million.
Dave
i'm seriously trying to replicate but not succeeding... Can you perhaps try and find the cause of this for me?
Hey Joost!
Thanks so much for trying to replicate this. To be honest. I'm getting the invalid header issue with a barebones 2.9.2 install with just the Gravity Forms and Gravity Mailchimp plugins active...
It's Gravity Forms 1.3.11 I'm using, if that helps.
So I can't really illuminate further, unfortunately. It's not a plugin conflict: unless there's a conflict with the latest iteration of the Gravity Forms plugin itself!
Dave
I'm having the same problem as well for the widget. "Invalid Header" error as well. Using the latest Gravity Forms (Dev. lic.) 1.3.11. and WP 2.9.1.
Unfortunately, I'm not versed as to what that means.
Hey man.
So is there nothing we can do here? Does it work with WP 3.0?
I've got it working, but the fields are all the same size and very close together.
Any idea how to fix that?
With CSS, the widget doesn't load any...