It’s been awhile since I’ve seen an upgrade notice for Gravity Forms but alas, 1.5 is here. This new version incorporates a ton of new features and enhancements. Among the new features are:
Multi-Page Forms – Using the new Page Break field you now have the ability split longer forms into multiple pages or steps. We have also integrated a visual paging status bar that can be used to show a progress bar or the steps involved in completing the form.
Pricing Fields – Pricing Fields allow you to create quotes and order forms. It features integrated pricing calculations and is compatible with the Gravity Forms PayPal Add-On. Pricing Fields consist of a Product Field, Option Field, Quantity Field, Shipping Field, Donation Field and Total Field. They allow you to easily turn your form into an order form and collect payments when combined with the PayPal Add-On.
Text Counter – A visual cue to show visitors the number of characters available for use on a text area.
CSS Ready Classes – Easily create multi-column layouts using built in CSS classes. These keywords are custom CSS classes you add to the CSS Class Name option under the Advanced tab for each field.
Default Notification – One of my favorite new additions will now automatically setup an admin notification that uses the WordPress Admin email as the Send To and includes all submitted form fields when a new form is created.
There are a couple of other things added as well but you can check those out on the spiffy new GravityForms Website. I’ve been using Gravity Forms on WPTavern.com to handle my contact form for a few months now and I’m happy to say that it’s some of the best money I’ve spent. While I only use it for a contact form, the UI enables me to quickly and easily create a post submission form or edit my existing forms. So far, I’ve yet to see an alternate form solution that’s as elegant and easy to use as Gravity Forms.
Kudos to the team on their newly designed website. One of the pain points regarding their old design was that it was difficult to locate the blog part of the site. Thankfully, they’ve fixed that by adding the blog link to the top of the new design.
I’ve been seeing a lot of your posts in the wpnews section of my dashboard, so congrats on that!
I did do a Gravity Forms upgrade just yesterday on my site, so I came over here to see what the new enhancements were, so thanks for writing about that. I’ve had Gravity Forms for about a year now and glad I have it, even though I use few of the powerful capabilities.
For those people who can’t invest the money in Gravity Forms right now, I recently heard of and just blogged today about JotForms. The UI reminds me of Gravity Forms and it is free to use (up to a point, see article) and also pretty powerful. They have SSL forms and it can be set up to accept payments through PayPal and many other related payment sites.
Thanks for keeping us informed!