Beta Rollout of Gravity Forms 2.7
With the release of Gravity Forms 2.7 (beta version for now), I got to see a brief glimpse into what the future of Gravity Forms holds. In a nutshell, it’s seemingly great for those of you using the standard WordPress Block Editor. But for myself, I use the page Editor Elementor which takes over the WYSIWYG styling and more.
I am aware that Gravity Forms integrates in with Elementor (when using the ‘Essential Addons’ plugin) but I don’t necessarily want to shell out $50/year for one or two features that I might not be able to alter via CSS myself. This is where I got excited about the gravity forms 2.7 template library.
Gravity Forms Template Library
Gravity forms now utilizes a template library that they are calling “Form Templates.” This is a great way to get your basic forms up and running, FAST. With template library, now appearing as a popup anytime you click ‘add a new form’ from within your WP dashboard, it’s easy to drop fields in and customize as needed (based on the template’s layout).
Don’t get me wrong, I love this way to get people going fast but it appears more of a skeleton rig that still needs some customization (and further HTML or CSS know-how). My bias is that I want to use as little CSS and HTML as necessary and have the form be the wizard behind-the-scenes.
I initially wanted to take a test run on the ‘request a quote’ form, as that’s what a good chunk of my business time goes towards (trying to shave off time spent emailing back and fourth and automizing the process) but it appears that there are some templates that are only available at a higher tier than I.
ecommerce form template example
Let’s take a look at an example ecommerce form template:
As you can see there are quite a few fields available for this particular template. There are quantities that tie in to a product calculation at the end of the form. What caught my eye in-particular was the three vertical images on the left sidebar. I thought they must be included in the ‘template’ (which I now come to understand that it’s not a theme per say but just that a design structure for the form fields).
Upon further inspection of the gravity forms ecommerce layout, there is not even html with a source code for the image. Again, this is an instance where I know how to do it but I don’t want to take those 5 minutes to sort out my file management and separate out the URLs, I want fast and easy.
gravity forms setup wizard
The Gravity Forms installation walkthrough is quite neat actually. I’m a bit fan of the aesthetics, and besides the two initial questions about sharing data (I totally get it, you need the marketing data) the setup is nice.
new honeypot feature
Something Else that I’m interested In taking for a spin in the new release is the updated Honeypot (similar to a recaptcha for stopping spam). The form settings now allow us to choose what to do with spam, do we want to create an entry and mark it as spam? Or do we want to not create an entry at all and move along? The choice is yours of course but behind-the-scenes there’s more javascript going on to keep us secure.
It’s hard to see where the changes happen to us without knowledge of code, as all it renders to us is a new button in the form options tab.
Overall, I think it’s a great piece of software and I’ll continue using them for conditional logic forms. I will mention that I am planning to purchase the JetSloth Bundle during the Black Friday deal this year. Some of the main features that I look forward to integrating into my lead generation methods are the color-picker and collapsible tabs. All things that one previously could do with the right set of code (but I’m all for the front-end design route).
front-end gravity forms creativity
Overall, the gravity forms has the same functionality – you are still required to input a form title and description when starting a form (makes sense). Upon looking at the changelog I see that there are a good amount of changes to those who use the block editor, shown in the screenshot below:
Overall, I think it’s a great piece of software and I’ll continue using them for conditional logic forms. I will mention that I am planning to purchase the JetSloth Bundle during the Black Friday deal this year. Some of the main features that I look forward to integrating into my lead generation methods are the color-picker and collapsible tabs. All things that one previously could do with the right set of code (but I’m all for the front-end design route).
