After reading many reviews after reviews of how great this plugin, gravity form is, I went ahead and gave it a try. It can get pretty redundant writing about the features, so just go ahead to their website and read on your own for what they have to offer. Here is the link Gravity Forms Now that you had a look at their website and if you’re really interested you probably even tried the demo they have to offer.

Back to my thoughts. Was it really convincing to me? or did I really just want to try it? Either way it was what I had expected in many areas, but let me down in some areas as well.

So it started like this.

I had a project that needed a quite a bit of custom entries needed on a wordpress site. Even though there are many form builders, I wanted something a bit more powerful in arranging, exporting and using the data we get.

Gravity Forms did most of it, but just didn’t execute it well. It felt as if I bought a bicycle without breaks. The forms functioned well, but just needed a manual way to do something simple.

The first issue was that I can’t simply customise the way it looks. They have an advanced field where you can layout the address or names really nice, but if you wanted to customise a look similar to it, you have to do a lot of digging in. They mentioned in their forum that it’s a request in mind for a future update.

Another issue is that the information is only available to the admin. So, if you wanted a third party to access just the data or even some part of the data, it is impossible. But we didn’t want any third party accessing the admin dashboard? If we can post the form in the pages with a code, why can’t we select the fields we want and create a private page with the collected data listed as in the admin page?

Well, normally you would think, it’s fine. At least there’s an export link to export the files in cvs. This way we can collect the data, organise it and manually create a report.

But wait a second. Yes I’ve tried this in English and it exported all right for the few words that I’ve tested.

Now in a different language and users inputting odd characters, commas, semicolons, quotation marks and apostrophes, I’m not getting the whole data exported! A big part of the data that was entered just did not get exported? So what did we do?

We went into the admin and copied field by field into an excel sheet. Now that’s a waste of time!

Finally after reading through their forums and googling around for a solution, we realised that some customisation is possible. By using their tags, you can select information, or play with some css to get a design closer to what we’re looking for. But again, why do we have to customise the programming when we see it that it’s possible?

In conclusion, for what this plugin is capable of doing, it can not execute it well. We’ll be waiting a few more upgrades before we can roll it out on the next production.