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Why We Use, Support & Recommend Gravity Forms at UpThemes

If you’ve ever used a free WordPress form plugin like Contact Form 7 – you understand my pain. There have been many advances in the free theme world, but for the most part, full-featured plugins have really lagged behind. In my opinion, they always will.

Enter Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a breath of fresh air when you think about the other options out there. You could write your own custom PHP forms (hello, security/spam nightmares!), take your chances with Contact Form 7, or try FormBuilder. There are a few decent plugins that come with a small price tag: Formidable Pro, AJAX Contact Forms for WordPress, and a few others.

After trying a number of these plugins, we settled on Gravity Forms. Here’s why.

It’s Like Having a Receptionist but Way Less Expensive

You may ask, “wait, are you telling me to fire Lisa?” No. What I’m saying is Gravity Forms acts as your website’s receptionist. Just like a receptionist routes calls to the various people in a company, Gravity Forms enables you to do the same thing with emails. In our case, we use Gravity Forms’ built-in conditional logic for our single contact form that not only routes form submissions to the right people but also hides the form under certain conditions.

Want to try it out? Go ahead and send us a message through our contact form. You’ll notice that as you change the drop-down selections, it’ll change the form when you select “Support.” We don’t provide email support, except in very rare emergency situations, so instead of allowing users to send us support requests via email, we display a message directing them to the user forums. Easy peasy.

It Uses Akismet to Filter Out Spam Submissions

If you’re anything like me, you hate distracting, spammy, junk mail. It breaks your focus and destroys productivity, even if only for a short period of time. This is one of the primary reasons we use Gravity Forms. We like to avoid getting garbage emails and focus on real email. You know, stuff that we get from customers, partners, affiliates and other team members.

If you have Akismet turned on, Gravity Forms will use it to filter out the junk submissions. We seriously get nearly ZERO spam submissions through our contact form. That, by itself, is reason enough for me to use Gravity Forms.

Advanced Form Builder

Advanced Form Builder Is Easier Than Easy

Instead of dealing with HTML and form field codes like some contact form plugins, Gravity Forms allows us to simply drag and drop different types of fields into our forms. No complicated shortcode generators or modifying HTML and input types manually. You can even build custom purchasing forms with complex price calculations. If you’re selling a simple product with customizable options that affect price, instead of installing a complex e-commerce shop with SSL and all types of complicated requirements, you should definitely just try Gravity Forms.

We’re Gravity Forms Fanatics – For Good Reason

We typically don’t support or even recommend third-party plugins to be used with our themes, but there are a few exceptions and Gravity Forms is one of them. Since we know and trust them as the best form plugin in the WordPress universe, we’re happy to support the usage of Gravity Forms with our themes. That means if there are any conflicts or styling issues, we’re happy to help resolve them because we know the product is solid and forms are extremely important for web businesses.

Learn more about Gravity Forms on their website.

4 Comments

  1. Avatar

    I’ve used Gravity Forms but I don’t like it very much. It has a lot of features and this is the biggest advantage. But it’s hard to dig into its code to see hooks to extend the plugin to fit my requirements. The code base, in my opinion is bad, no coding standards as well as poor names (variables, functions). That’s what I remember from Gravity Forms.

    Now I’m using custom code to build simple forms (such as contact form). It doesn’t take too much effort to do that.

  2. Avatar
    Chris says:

    I really want to like GF and I do — but it seems that so many webservers can’t send emails to their own domains so that the email never reaches the client. I find using 3rd party Wufoo is much more reliable.

    Any tips on how to get around that?

  3. Avatar
    Andy Gongea says:

    There is no doubt that GF is the best WordPress plugin to implement forms. A lot of features, additional plugins and easy to use, But when it comes to licensing, they pretty much robbing you. ‘That’s the downside and a big one.

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