Use Gravity Forms Merge Tags in Your Post Content

Gravity Forms has excellent support for form confirmations. As always, Gravity Wiz aims to take that support a little further.

Gravity Forms provides an easy way to display personalized information via the “Text” confirmation type. You select which Merge Tags (which represent submitted form data) and place them in the text confirmation as desired. When the text confirmation is displayed, the merge tags will be replaced with the submitted data each merge tag represents.

But what if you wanted to do this on a separate confirmation page using the “Page” or “Redirect URL” confirmation types? You could readily pass the required data to the page via the “Pass Field Data Via Query String” option; however, while this option allows you to pass submitted data to the confirmation page, it does not provide a method for displaying that data on the confirmation page.

Post Content Merge Tags provides the following key points of functionality:

1. Reclaim complete control over the styling of your Thank You / Confirmation pages. And use any Gravity Forms merge tags in the content of the page.

2. Reuse the same confirmation page for multiple forms. For instance, you might have 25 forms on your site but would like to redirect users from all of those forms to a single, personalized “Thank You” page on submission.

3. Implement persistent confirmation pages. For example, you could send the user an email including the confirmation page URL to their form submission, which they could save for future reference.

Ready to take your confirmation pages to the next level? Let’s dig in.

Getting Started

The following tutorial requires Post Content Merge Tags to be installed and activated on your site. Once installed, you can add merge tags to your confirmation pages, with ease. Let’s get started.

Steps

Step 1 – Create Your Form

Start by creating your form. There’s no special steps to take here. Build the form any way you please with any fields that make sense for your particular form.

Step 2 – Create Confirmation Page

Once your form is complete, it’s time to build the confirmation page. Create the page you’ll redirect the user to once they submit a form entry. It isn’t required for you to insert the page’s content during this step. You simply need to create the page.

Step 3 – Configure Form Confirmation

Navigate back to your form’s Settings page. Go to the Confirmations tab to set up a page redirect to the confirmation page you created in Step 2. Choose the page from the drop down, and check Enable Merge Tags in Page Content.

Set up a page redirect to the thank you page you created

Then, click Edit Page Content to add the desired merge tags to the post content of the confirmation page. Any merge tag that can be inserted into the “Text” confirmation’s “Message” field, can be used in the post content of your confirmation page. Post Content Merge Tags adds a merge tag button to the WordPress editor to simplify this step.

That’s It

Once you have your confirmation page completed, fill out the form you created. If everything was set up correctly, you will have a merge-tag-powered confirmation page!

Tips for using a single confirmation page for multiple Gravity forms

If you have multiple forms that you would like to redirect to the same confirmation page, the first step is make sure you’ve set the confirmation for each form to redirect to your custom confirmation page.

It is important that the field labels for each form match the merge tag label in the confirmation page template. For example if your field label is Email, you’re merge tag would be {Email}. If you changed the field label to Email Address the merge tag for that form would be different and {Email} would no longer work.

This is another reason why you might consider setting an admin label for your form fields and using this instead of the field label when adding your post content merge tags. The admin label is less likely to change and also allows you flexibility on the field label between forms.