Behind The Scenes: Gravity Perks for eSports

1. Gravity Wiz Weekly Newsletter

There’s a different kind of athleticism on the rise. It takes place behind a desk, on a chair. 🧑‍💻

As of last year, some e-sports events bring more unique viewers than the Super Bowl.

United States eSports Academy (USEA) turns gamers into athletes. They offer live coaching, facilitate tournaments, host workshops, and provide a range of other services that help gaming-pros-to-be finesse their armchair expertise.

USEA connects players with coaches who are skilled in games like:

• Call of Duty: Vanguard
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• DOTA 2
• FIFA 22
• Halo

Recently, USEA reached out to East of Eden (EOE.work), an SME agency with fifteen years of experience in the WordPress game, for help with a web-based booking system.

They were looking for a way to better facilitate their live coaching events — a means for players to quickly book sessions with pro coaches for the game of their choice.

Here’s what USEA needed from East of Eden:

• A booking form that would allow a player to book a coach at a specific date and time.
• A form that functioned more interactively with USEA data. They needed to pull from their database in real-time, where they store information like coaching availability and workshop details.
• The form needed to be editable on the front end.

East of Eden was able to meet these requirements — and then surpass them with the help of Gravity Forms and Gravity Perks. This is an exciting one! Here’s a look behind the scenes at how each perk plays its part. 

• GP Populate Anything allows them to pull details from their own databases, including coaching info and availability, which the coaches can add themselves.
• GP Limit Dates prevents coaches from booking available slots in the past and only allows for specific, predefined dates into the future.
• GP Easy passthrough + Edit Gravity Forms Entries on the Front End (their favorite combo) allows them to edit past submissions, which as EOE notes, “is great as we are storing the entry ID to allow editing from the front end of the site.”
• GP Nested Forms – used in multiple scenarios depending on the coaching event and reused in other forms. Allows dynamic Nested Forms to populate based on what the players are selecting on each form.

“In our form, we had a Nested Form that would allow the admin to create a “workshop” that runs over a specific number of days, but the issue was coming in that we needed to know if that coach was available on that day before allowing the workshop to be created.”

As a Pro customer, we were able to help East of Eden with a custom validation code to properly run a MySQL query to ensure coaching availability was pulled correctly. 

Here’s an example of someone trying to book a coaching session on Jan 21st, 2022.

And here’s the error message resulting from the coach not being available on this date:

“Thanks to David’s assistance and guidance, we can now check our custom tables to query if that “coach” is available on the day the workshop is due or if they are already booked on that day.”

If we zoom out, Gravity Forms Populate Anything’s use in this example can be expanded far beyond Date and Time availability. Populate Anything supports pulling information from databases, Google Sheets, users, taxonomies, posts, or any other source to dynamically populate fields and values in real-time. 

We’ve seen clients use external data sources (and even Gravity Forms entries) to populate their form fields and values with daily menus, a rotating list of eCommerce products, or available sales agents for a demo. When we say any source, we mean it!

I need to go brush up on my Dota 2 skills now, so we’re signing off. Thanks for sharing your fantastic use case, Danny!