Ahh the new Gravity Forms, WordPress form management plugin. To reinforce the fact that this is an impartial review I will point out that I have long been an advocate and user of the ddformailer plugin by Dagon Design, in fact you can see it running on my contact pages.

While I have only scratched the surface in the uses of this particular plugin, I feel I can give a good review based on the number of alternate WordPress form management solutions I have worked with.

Why I decided to give Gravity Forms a trial run and ultimately or should I say easily convince a client to purchase a license during the course of a recent project. Features, installation and custom configuration, it’s as simple as that. I did a quick review shot this particular client a link to the demos and we both decided that it couldn’t get much easier than that. In fact he was sold in less than five minutes.

To my surprise the installation and configuration didn’t take much longer than it took for him to make the purchase. Total time spent in getting the first form up and running: Under 30mins, and that was primarily due to some extensive drop down lists included in his particular form.

This is of course coming from the experience of someone who works with WordPress and it’s various plugins all day everyday, of course it is easy for me. So how easy would it be for the average user? Personally I don’t think it would take your average user much longer than it took me. In my opinion the user interface couldn’t be more self explanatory or easy to use.

A second huge selling point for my client: The ability to log and export all contact information as well as enter notes. This particular client has long been awaiting something exactly like this to be integrated with WordPress. Given the type of business garnering these lists and extracting the data is essential. The fact that he can now set it and forget, exporting the list when needed, allows him to practically run his mailing list on auto pilot and focus on the other aspects of the business that need a bit more attention. It was a no brainer.

Finally the choice of thank you page or thank you message, plus the ability to easily set up an auto responder sealed the deal.

What would I change at this point. Well not much but given the experience I had, I would say that it would be rather nice to have the option to input your select box fields by way of a comma separated list rather than individual entry fields. Only reason is that it would cut down on an already lightening speed installation if extensive options are provided.

Overall I am super impressed with the initial launch of Gravity Forms and I definitely see it coming into play on more than one project in the near future.

It doesn’t happen often but every once and awhile I don’t mind grabbing and affiliate banner when I am willing to stand by something that I think is worth promoting. Check out Gravity Forms and be sure to stop by the demo and have a look for yourself.

Update: I decided to get with the program and purchase a dev license to Gravity Forms. While I have not transitioned to them on this site (yet), you can check it out, serving up this form on jeremyjaymes.com.

Update Two: This site is now using Gravity Forms

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