Gravity Wiz Weekly 196

Greetings, wizards! 

We’re already two weeks into Q3, and I can barely remember what I did over the weekend by Monday morning, so this is probably my last chance to share our Q2 highlights before they’re lost to time. 😂

So, what did we get done in the last three months?

• Hired two new support wizards to continue providing legendary support.
• 3 epic perk releases: GP Google Sheets Beta 2, Populate Anything 2.0, and Advanced Select.
• Implemented 183 features, bug fixes, and improvements to the Gravity Perks suite.
• Added 42 new snippets to our Snippet Library.
• Hosted two live workshops – always a blast!

Not too shabby! A special thank you to our mythical team of wizards that make all of this magic possible. 🙏

Now, back to our regularly scheduled wizardry. 😄

Suite Highlights

GP Advanced Select

Beautiful, searchable, extensible Drop Down and Multi Select fields, capable of dynamically populating massive datasets.

This week, Advanced Select received support for dynamically populating values when lazy loading is enabled. 

This means you can now use Populate Anything to populate the choices that will appear in the field and the default value that will be selected, all while improving performance with large datasets by waiting for the user to interact with the field before querying the database for those choices.

GP Google Sheets

Automatically send and sync Gravity Forms data with Google Sheets — and unlock new possibilities for your data.

We’re marching forward towards 1.0! Folks mapping lots of forms to spreadsheets have been encountering limits with the way GPGS interacts with the Google Sheets API. We’re actively working on improving this experience and this week introduces are first batch of improvements.

First, we’ve dramatically improved the efficiency of how and how much metadata is added for new spreadsheet rows. We also implemented refactors so GPGS pings the Google Sheets API less often. Just two of the myriad of bug fixes and improvements we made this week for GP Google Sheets.

GP Limit Dates

Limit which days are selectable for your Datepicker fields with a minimum and maximum range, specific days of the week, and linked date fields.

We’ve got a fun little quality-of-life improvement for you in Limit Dates. Some users prefer to enter plain numbers instead of fully formatted dates. This week, we added support for automatically formatting manually entered dates into the field’s specified date format. 

This functionality pairs really well with our new Hide Datepicker on Manual Input snippet. Here’s both in action:

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Want to read more about this week’s Gravity Perks updates? See the full changelog below.

Reminders

1. 🤖 AI 4 the People – OpenAI’s GPT-4 is now generally available (no more waitlist!) and our free GF OpenAI plugin already supports it. Go put next-gen AI to work in your forms.
   
2. 🧪 Coming Soon – Our new product line (Gravity Shop) and its flagship product (GS Product Configurator) are just around the corner. If you want to explore creating crazy customizable WooCommerce products powered by Gravity Forms ahead of the launch, get access to the alpha.
   
3. ⭐ Appreciation – You’re awesome. No, seriously. We’re constantly impressed by our customers. You’re doing incredible work! Check out this week’s spotlight for an example. 

Spotlight: Entry Blocks for Conference Attendee Management at Scale

Conference planning can get messy. Attendees may want to join late, some cancel, speakers change, and plenty of other fun surprises must be accounted for.  

To manage such contingencies, Henry Vandermeir built a backend administration platform for his client — The American Academy of Pediatrics — who were was holding their 44th annual conference in Las Vegas. 

This tool allows conference admins to manage and make changes to all registrations (i.e. Gravity Forms entries) from the front end, and it’s powered by Entry Blocks. 

We got a detailed look behind the scenes at how it works.

New Resources

GP Inventory | Only Show Next n Choices

Create urgency and efficiency by only showing a limited amount of your available options. As those options are consumed, automatically reveal additional options.

Let’s imagine you’re giving daily consultations. You’d really like to book each consultation to keep a full schedule. Rather than letting folks choose any date in the future, you only show your next three sessions. As each session is reserved, additional sessions are revealed.

Learn Something New | Parent Form Context in Child Forms (with Nested Forms)

This one’s for the code wranglers!

When using hooks like gform_pre_render to alter child forms, you may expect that the child form is loaded in the same context as the parent form – the same post/page with the same query parameters available. Not quite.

The child form markup is fetched via AJAX after the parent form has been initialized or when editing an entry. This means it’s loaded in the context of the admin-ajax.php script, and not the page/URL on which the parent form is embedded.

This can be problematic if you’re looking to use the context of the parent form to affect the output of the child form. For example, populating form fields from custom fields attached to the parent embed page.

The good news is that Nested Forms provides a session cookie that you can use to access any context from the parent form. This snippet shows a basic example of how you can retrieve that context. We would love to provide additional clarity here so let us know what questions you have.

Advanced Save & Continue | User-enabled Auto Save & Continue

Unauthenticated users will be prompted to allow automatic Save & Continue but a) this only applies to users who aren’t logged-in and b) once the decision is made, they can’t change that decision unless they clear their cookies.

This snippet allows you to bind that decision to a form field. Select “Yes” to enable Auto Save & Continue or “No” to disable. Power to the people!

Gravity Perks

GP Advanced Phone Field (v1.0.16)

• Fixed issue with Advanced Phone Field labels not pointing to the right input in their for attributes.

GP Advanced Select (1.0-beta-1.2)

• Improved support for dynamically populating values of lazy-loaded multi-select fields.

GP Disable Entry Creation (v2.0.3)

• Updated require call to use plugin_dir_path().
• Fixed an issue with the conditional rules setting not showing in the Form Settings after saving.

GP Google Sheets (1.0-beta-2.5)

• Added new gpgs_show_action_scheduler_purge PHP filter hook to show a panel in the GP Google Sheets settings to purge uncomplete actions from Action Scheduler.
• Improved efficiency of how metadata is added to new rows.
• Improved user experience by blocking “Select existing sheet” if a Gravity Perks license isn’t present instead of nothing happening when clicking the radio button.
• Improved caching of a few methods to reduce the number of read requests to the Google Sheets API.
• Updated Action Scheduler to 3.6.1.
• Updated the developer metadata keys to be smaller to reduce the number of characters used as Google Sheets has character limits on the number of characters that can be in the metadata for each spreadsheet/sheet.
• Fixed issue where feeds that fail to send to Google Sheets could sometimes prevent other feeds from sending data to Sheets.
• Fixed issues where “Select existing sheet” wouldn’t work for users who did not have permission to activate/install plugins.
• Fixed issue where a required Gravity Forms class wouldn’t be loaded in some cases when adding entries to Google Sheets.
• Fixed issue where the column map would not save to the sheet for some feeds.
• Fixed PHP 8.1 deprecation notices.

GP Limit Dates (v1.1.24)

• Added support for typing in months without separators (e.g. 01012020 instead of 01/01/2020).

GP Limit Submissions (v1.1.11)

• Updated require call to use plugin_dir_path().
• Fixed an issue where the Embed URL rule would not limit entries for URLs exceeding 200 characters in length.

GP Nested Forms (v1.1.31)

• Added gpnf_should_use_simple_details_template PHP filter hook.
• Fixed issue where child entries could be removed when adding items to a cart using WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-ons 3.5.0 or newer.

GP Page Transitions (v1.0.18)

• Fixed an issue where the page count would sometimes not be correct when using Soft Validation. This could prevent submission when at the end of the form.

GP Populate Anything (v2.0.7)

• Added gppa_ajax_form_pre_render PHP filter hook.
• Improved support for populating Date fields using the Date Drop Down input type with values from other Date fields.
• Fixed issue where animation name “pulse” conflicted with animation names included in other 3rd-party libraries.
• Fixed issue where value population of lazy-loaded Advanced Select multi-selects would not work in some cases.
• Fixed PHP error that could occur in some forms using Email fields with “Email Confirmation” enabled.
• Fixed a regression with the query cache hash for the GF Entry Object Type.

GP QR Code (v1.0.10)

• Added gp_qr_code_merge_tag_value filter to allow customizing the output of QR merge tags.