Gravity Forms

Carl and myself discussed Gravity Forms, a new Premium WordPress plugin to easily create complex forms in your WordPress install. Carl even shared a promo code for listeners: use PRESSTHIS as your promo code and receive an instant 20% off!

Here's the full transcript:

This is another Press This and today we have another pretty cool guest coming on, Carl Hancock. Carl is actually one of the guys behind Gravity Forms which is the newest premium plug in rocking the Word Press sphere. Carl thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. I hope everybody is enjoying the plug in launch. I’m just trying to catch a breather, it’s been a tiring last 24 hours plus.

I’m not going to let you catch your breath for the coming 30 minutes or so. Could you do everyone a favor and quickly introduce yourself and your company?

My name is Carl Hancock and I’m with a small development studio called Rocket Genius along with my partners Kevin (last name) and Alex Cansado and we just launched gravity forms which is a premium Word Press plug in that allows you to create and manage forms from within Word Press.

Yeah I’ve been testing it for quite a while as you know and I’ll tell everyone right now I absolutely love it!

That’s nice to hear.

Yeah well we do a lot of client work at Orange Valley, which is my daytime job and we set up forms like on each site we build because everyone seems to need a form somewhere and they all need to have a different one. So I was actually aching for a plug in like this and working with it has been an absolute pleasure.

How did you decide to go premium and do a plug in like this? Because there is not too many premium plug ins out there yet and it is a debated thing. So what made you decide to go and do a premium plug in?

It is fairly new and there are only a few premium Word Press plug ins out there, especially that are GPL compliant with Word Press for licensing. Shop, the e-commerce plug in, comes to mind and they’re probably the most successful GPL premium plug in for Word Press. We saw what they were doing and figured we would give it a shot. It’s worked for the theme developers and so there is no reason why a plug in can’t be premium just like themes are.

It will provide the users with more reliability in the plug ins that they’re using. You’re not going to download Gravity Forms and worry are we going to stop development on it next month and you’re stuck and you can’t get support if a new version of Word Press comes out. It might not be compatible and there is nobody there to pick up and fix it.

So we figured the market is ready for a premium plug in and judging by the response we’ve seen over the last 24 hours it’s very encouraging.

Yeah. I do agree that it’s time for stuff like contact forms which is like really necessary on a lot of sites to be premium and properly supported. The only issue that Matt seems to have taken with all of this is whether it’s GPL or not. You guys are GPL so you’re sticking to the license and people could basically after having bought the plug in redistribute it. Are you afraid of people doing that?

I wouldn’t say we’re afraid of it. We wouldn’t have gone GPL if we weren’t fully aware of what could happen. If someone wants to redistribute it they can redistribute it but do you really want to go to the 3rd party go get something or do you want to go to the source who is going to be able to actually answer your questions and support the product.

There is a problem right now with premium themes hitting the Torrent sites and they contain all sorts of defective malware and people are putting spam links and all sorts of code into the theme and people don’t know any better and install it and that is a big security risk. You can put code into a premium theme that gives someone control of your website by resetting passwords. You can do anything, it’s PHP. There is anything the theme can do and if you download it and use it from a source you’re not sure where it comes from you’re putting your site at risk by doing that.

So I really think that if people want to use quality software they need to support the developers that create that quality software.

I agree the only issue is they get this software for free, which is Word Press and then start whining when they have to pay for something else. It is a pretty big step to make for some people it seems.

Certainly for the average blogger who is using Word Press it’s not necessarily necessary but your example, the company you run, Word Press is being used for big businesses now. There is a lot of functionality that Word Press doesn’t do that plug ins like Gravity Forms can pick up and provide on top of the CMS functionality that Word Press provides. So I mean the notion that everything needs to be free just because Word Press is free is I think is just wrong.

Yeah kind of ridiculous. I’ve been debating this back and forth with myself, which is always a problem I think but my biggest issue is I’m not releasing stuff that I’ve built right now because I just don’t want to give any support on it.

Yeah it’s a big burden.

Yeah and Jeffro sitting in the chat room wants to know why not go with the donation model?

Nobody donates.

Nobody fucking donates. I’ve just made this show PG-13 I think.

Its true nobody donates. Everybody like to think they would donate and support it but the reality is I can’t remember what the percentages are but someone posted the percentages and they were so miniscule that it just doesn’t work that model doesn’t work.

No, for everyone listening that thinks this is exaggerated, Sociable with like 500,000 plus downloads at the moment in the Word Press repository which is a plug in I maintain at the moment I get like one donation a month.

That’s absurd. As good a plug in that it is and as many people who are using it, it just goes to show the donation model doesn’t work, nobody uses it.

It could work a lot better to be honest. If I promoted the donation stuff a bit more and if Word Press promoted it a bit more that is some of the stuff I would love to talk to you and Matt about soon. I’ve already invited him to be with me on the show and talk about stuff like that.

But there could be more for that and I think stuff like that it really makes sense to go into premium and to be able to put some more time into development.

It is definitely going to depend on the plug in. Not any plug in is a good candidate to go commercial. There are a lot of plug ins out there that provide good functionality but very small functionality and the plug in has to be right for the commercial model to work. I really think so.

Yeah absolutely true. One of the questions I had you said you’re a pretty small development company, you have invested quite a bit of time up front into building this plug in. It has probably been a couple of months of development?

Yeah we’ve been working on it since probably I would say around April that we started development on it. Obviously, that wasn’t completely full time. We also do client and custom work which is so we have to balance our time between the 2 but we’re trying to develop more and more attention to Gravity Forms. And hopefully if it takes off that is the situation we’ll be in.

How will you support it going forward? If you sell enough you’ll keep developing it and keep pushing it? And if it stops selling at some point you’ll have to stop developing I guess.

We’re not necessarily going to say we’re just going to stop developing. We have other projects that we intend to develop alongside Gravity Forms. So we have other things that we’re looking at doing to get out of the custom client development work. And Gravity Forms is one of those products that we’re putting out there.

Cool so we have to go to our sponsors for a bit and then after that we’ll be back and probably take some questions from the chat room.

(ADVERTISEMENT)

Welcome back and we’re talking to Carl Hancock, Gravity Forms about the cool plug in. Carl can you give us a brief rundown of what you can do with the plug in? We’ve sort of forgot to tell people that.

Sure Gravity Forms is a form and data management plug in for Word Press. With it you can easily create a variety of different types of forms for your website that enable users to submit data to you. Those forms could be everything from a contact us form to a post submission form that allows visitors to submit an article to your website and then it is automatically created into a post that you then have to approve.

You really could use it for some many things once you start thinking about it. With the functionality you can do everything from a Tell a Friend form to even things like bug tracking.

Yeah I’m working on that.

There are a variety of things you can do with it as is and we have functionality on tap that is going to extend that even further.

Yeah I’ve been working on doing a plug in support contact form on my site using it. So yeah it is absolutely great. We’ve had some questions in the chat room already, one from my buddy Justin who asks or is assuming he can use multiple, can make multiple forms. Yeah of course you can I don’t think there is a limit is there Carl?

No you’re only limited by your database space I would imagine, which is probably pretty large. So I can’t imagine you’re going to breach any wall. There is no limitations.

No and the cool thing is, one of the things I really like about it is that it’s nice to be able to email when someone fills in a form and it’s stored in the database, so no issues with emails being lost and stuff like that.

Yeah it’s all stored in the database and you can view it from within the dashboard and you can also export the data into CSV so you can use in any 3rd party applications you may be using online or off that supports importing via a CSV file.

So you can export to CSV and can you do that on a filter or is it just an export of all the contact forms?

When you’re exporting the data to CSV it’s on a form by form basis. You basically get a tool that asks which form you would like to export the data for and then you can pick and choose which form fields from that form as well as NRA, a date range for the entries you want to export. Then it will out put a CSV based on the filters that you fill out and submit.

Okay cool. People are asking if Gravity Forms works on WPMU as well?

Yeah we actually tested it and it’s also some of our Beta testers actually used it on MU. I was actually testing it and using it on MU earlier today and it does work on Word Press MU 2.8 and above.

Yeah and we’ve been using it, most of what we do for our clients is one big Word Press MU install with a couple of sites in it and it works just fine there. The only issue you could have with it is that it creates its own database and so you have to make sure you back up those as well when you’re doing a database backup.

Yeah because of the nature of data that is stored it does create some tables to store the entry data. So for every MU blog, for instance, it does add some database overhead.

Yeah there is no problem with the database overhead it’s just that you have to, well just make sure to back it up. I’ve seen that go wrong an awful lot of times. People are saying in the chat room, are asking if you can create a post with it as well? I know it’s possible but I haven’t tried it yet. Is there anything you need to know about it or is it just create a form and people can post to your website?

We have some special form fields that you can add to a form that allow you to create a post. If these fields aren’t on the form the post isn’t going to get created. There is a field for the title, the body, the excerpt, tags and custom fields even that you can use custom fields that you may be using. If you add any of those fields to your form in any combination it will create a post with the submission as a draft. You then have to approve it before it’s published of course.

But it makes it really easy for making a simple user submitted article type of form functionality. We have plans for adding to this functionality in the future and adding some more fields and making the Word Press integration even tighter than it already is.

Cool. People are asking for an example form and well I can give you 2 of them that is on my site, www.yoast.com, both the contact page and the hire me page forms are built with Gravity Forms. I’m not even using my own contact form plug in anymore which is probably a bad thing but hey that’s how life is, this one is better.

I thought that was a very nice compliment knowing you have your own contact form plug in but you are using Gravity Forms. I love to see that for obvious reasons. It’s a very nice endorsement.

It is. If I didn’t think it worked for an endorsement you wouldn’t be here to be honest. But it is just an awful lot better and because it stores stuff in the database and I have my email problems from time to time, as in I get too much of it, it is pretty good to have it all stored like that.

Justin is asking how often you guys plan on updating. There are some people who seem to have a problem with plug ins being updated each day.

I doubt we’ll be updating every single day unless there are some sorts of critical issues, which I hope don’t need to be fixed. But we plan on updating the plug in regularly with both any bug fixes that may occur as well as incremental feature upgrades. Probably not to the point where it’s going to get annoying where every time you log in there is an update to the plug in. but we do plan on updating the plug in regularly . I can’t really give you an exact time period in between upgrades but we plan on improving it regularly.

Okay anything you’ve got on the feature list that people need to know about or can expect soon?

Expect soon…we have a very long feature list of things we intend on adding. There are a bunch of things that keep coming up time and time again when people ask for features. One of the things we do plan on introducing is a way to process payments and take payments to turn a form into an order form. We’re not talking shopping cart type functionality here, just simply a single page order form. We also plan on adding more and more Word Press integration into the plug in. Right now you can create posts, we plan on possibly doing things like creating user accounts and using Gravity Forms to create a registration form that then creates a user account on your site.

There are so many places we can take it and we’re looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Yeah cool. There are some hooks in there right for other plug in offers, hook our own stuff into Gravity Forms.

Yeah we have a few hooks in the plug in right now. Primarily around the form submission process so that you can take the data and do what you need to do with it before Gravity Forms then submits it as well as after the form is submitted. We intend on adding more hooks and increasing the areas where you can manipulate it using other plug ins.

We really want to make it developer friendly so that others can take it to the next level as well and not just us. We have people like the developers of pods, the I’m not sure how you would classify it, I guess it’s a CMS plug in for Word Press that want to use it to make it easier to submit data to your pods.

There are all sorts of things developers could do with it, so we’re really looking forward to see how people use it to accomplish their goals.

Can Gravity Forms save information like the IP address and referrer or submitter?

Yeah right now we do save the IP address and we save the URL that the form was embedded on. So it is not necessarily the referrer although if it’s not there it is something that will probably be adding but we do save the IP address and the URL of the page that the form was submitted from. You may have a form that might appear on multiple pages since really you can put a form anywhere on a site, you can embed a form anywhere on a page or post using short codes or functions.

So a form could be 5 different places on your site, so the embed URL tells you which page the user came from when they submitted the form.

Yeah the only thing that my contact plug in did that Gravity Forms doesn’t do yet is store the entire path a visitor takes through your site and adds that to the contact form. It would be cool to store a bit more like that. They are also asking about form analytics and yeah it’s pretty easy to add Google Analytics, I’ve seen myself.

You can make a confirm page and add your analytic script based on that. And…

Yeah the confirm page can be either text you enter in the forms settings or it can be a redirect to another page. So on that confirm page you can put whatever tracking code you need to put and track your conversions using Google Analytics.

Okay we’re going to take another quick break and come back and answer a couple of more questions.

(ADVERTISEMENT)

We’re back and good to hear a plug from my buddies at Search Cowboys and be sure to tune in I think its Thursday it’s a great show which you should be listening too.

There are 2 questions in the chat room now Carl about how the license will work with WPMU. Would you need a multi-site license if you are going to use it or how would that work?

It’s going to depend on your set up really. The support licensing is primarily based around domain names so if not all your blogs on your WPMU are on their own domains and checking for automatic upgrades then you should be able to use the single site license. But if all your blogs are using different domains you’re going to need the developer license because that is technically different sites even if it’s on one Word Press MU instance.

Okay.

So it’s going to be domain based.

Okay so if it’s for a client of mine say, Blogo.nl and they all have sub domains I can use just one license on all those sub domains?

Yeah if they’re using MU and they have like many sites with their site the single license should be fine.

Okay sounds good. For the pricing for people wondering the single site license is like $39 bucks which is bloody cheap if you ask me. A multi-site license is $99 and the developer license is $199. I haven’t bought it yet to be honest but the developer license is a way to get it to people like me.

You were going to be nice to our listeners weren’t you?

Yeah we have a coupon code for anybody that is listening in on this show. If you’re checking out and purchasing Gravity Forms if you use the coupon code, Pressthis, all one word, you’ll get a 20% off any of the 3 available packages.

That’s pretty cool and thank you for that. I think some more people in the chat room and the people listening later on will thank you for that as well. Jeff is kidding in the chat room and he has a couple code for 99% off. I think Carl is going to fix that form so it won’t work for Jeff.

Yeah we’ll have to ban his IP. He’s also talking about it on the Torrent sites to so we’ll have to keep an eye on Jeff.

Yeah indeed. It is always the thing with these Word Press podcasters. So basically all I can say is go get Gravity Forms, use the coupon code Pressthis, all caps right?

I’m not 100% sure if all caps really does matter. If they want to be safe do all caps, I know that’s how it appears in the system. So if you want to be safe I would do PRESSTHIS, all in caps but I’m not 100% sure if it matters.

Okay very cool. We’re going to have to get you back on later to talk more about premium plug ins, probably with some other plug in authors I’m talking with to do a show on how to do premium plug ins for other plug in authors.

Yeah that would be great. I think it’s a big market that is largely untapped right now. There is some resistance obviously but I think ultimately plug in developers need to start being rewarded for some of the work they’ve put into the community.

Absolutely I think it’s about time for me to for it to happen as well. Thanks a lot for being here Carl and we’ll talk to you soon.

Thanks for having me.

So that wraps up Press This for this week. I’m very proud to say that we’re now on I-Tunes so you should go and subscribe to Press This on I-Tunes, just search for it and you’ll find us. We’ll talk to you next week and we’ve got a pretty call line up coming up already. I’ve put it up on www.yoast.com/pressthis. Next week we’ll talk to Mark Jaquith, an elite developer of Word Press about the future of Word Press. Thanks and talk to you next week.