Gravity Wiz Weekly #159

Greetings, wizards! 

The biggest news you’ll hear all week? Gravity Forms acquires Gravity Flow. Grats to both teams and cheers to the future of this epic ecosystem! 🍻

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming: new features, fresh resources, and some sweet, sweet wizardry. 🧙‍♂️

Snippet Spells for Editing with Entry Blocks 🪄

We’ve been writing a ton of sorcerous snippets that alter and enhance the entry editing experience with Entry Blocks. Here’s a batch we’re considering for inclusion in core. Use them on your next project and let us know what you think!

Process Feeds on Entry Edit – One of our more popular requests: the ability to process Gravity Forms feeds when an entry is edited. Think MailChimp, User Registration, HubSpot, Advanced Post Creation, etc.

Update Post on Entry Edit – If you’re using Gravity Forms Post fields to generate posts from your form submissions, update the existing post when you edit the associated entry.

Delete (or Trash) Associated Post – In the same vein as updating posts after editing entries, automatically delete (or trash) a post after its associated entry is deleted (or trashed).

Remove Product Fields on Entry Edit – Entry Blocks defaults to letting you edit all entry details but you may not want end users editing their orders, just their personal details. This snippet removes Product fields when editing an entry.

Set Read Only on Entry Edit – Want to display some entry data without allowing it to be edited? Combine the powers of Read Only and Entry Blocks to set specific fields as read only when edited.

Still haven’t checked out our newest enchantment for displaying and editing entries on the front end?

Gravity Forms 2.7 Beta 1 is Here!

The rocket geniuses on the Gravity Forms team have been busy these past few months, culminating in the release of Gravity Forms 2.7 Beta 1. This beta is packed with some incredible improvements to our beloved form builder. Here are two of my personal highlights.

Form Template Library – Build forms faster with premade, fully-customizable form templates. Pick the best template for your needs, modify as needed, and start getting submissions! My not-so-secret hope is that this functionality will be expanded to allow creating your own form templates and auto-enabling/configuring dependent plugins as well.

Form Theme Framework – Themes for your form provide a stylishly opinionated foundation that you can publish as is, or customize with the accompanying block styling options. This feature may be in its infancy but it’s a decisive next step towards complete visual control of your forms.

There is much more worth checking out in the release post and I would strongly recommend reading through the 2.7 documentation notes.

Question of the Week

Last week we asked which features you would most like to see in Auto Save & Continue. You gave us some great feedback!

You also suggested a few other features:

• Display saved sessions as a list via a shortcode or dashboard widget.
• Automatically save new child entries added to Nested Form fields.
• Send reminder emails for pending sessions.

Thank you to everyone who tossed their hat in the ring. We’ll be back next week with a fresh question! 

Spotlight: Internal Web Apps with Nested Forms & Populate Anything

West SA is a marketing agency out of Greece. Tasos Tiligadis, their Digital Manager, recently shared how they’re using Gravity Perks to help power internal sales applications in a message that contains some of the nicest words we’ve read in recent memory. 🥲

We’ll let Tasos take it from here.

“We build beautiful web apps with Gravity Forms for our sales teams. We have about 2000 people that use our WordPress apps with the help of Gravity Perks.

We have a sales app that managers use to import weekly plans in WordPress. Sales teams are loading data from the schedule in their sales forms using Populate Anything. In all of them we use Nested Forms which is a big help for us (both of these perks I think are the best of the best). Finally, the managers can pull reports with the help of some very useful snippets you have provided to the public (and totally free for the world!).

I have used your perks so many times and they have really helped our company. So far, I haven’t met a problem your team wasn’t able to help solve, big or small. Every time you guys offer so much knowledge and solutions. I really appreciate your business and your help.

…And your newsletter is the only newsletter I read with interest and wait for it every Friday like a new Netflix episode. 😁

Ps. If Harry Potter had a WordPress installation, his magic wand would be just a perk of yours.”

Comments like these make what we do worthwhile. Thanks for sharing, Tasos. 🥲

Resources

Disable Validation for Advanced Phone Field – We released Advanced Phone Field last week. It now has its first snippet in the Snippet Library! 

While we don’t recommend using this snippet, some customers indicated that they just weren’t ready to trust the accuracy of Google’s phone number validation library and only wanted to have the numbers auto-formatted on the frontend. No problem! This snippet will disable the backend validation, allowing you to collect any phone number.

Do you know Gravity Forms shortcodes as well as you think? – We probably spent too much time unearthing long-forgotten knowledge for this article but the end result is the most comprehensive coverage of Gravity Forms shortcodes you’ll ever read. I’m certain you’ll discover a few shortcode secrets that will make a difference on your next project.

Auto Relaunch Nested Forms Modal – Entering data in bulk with a Nested Form field? Automatically relaunching the modal after submitting the child form can optimize the process in a big way. And it’s surprisingly easy to do with this snippet.

Gravity Perks

GP Advanced Phone Field (v1.0.1)

• Fixed issue where the phone value could be lost on multi-page forms while navigating pages.
• Fixed issue with validation where the phone field would be validated even if hidden.

GP Nested Forms (v1.1.3)

• Fixed PHP error that could occur for some forms.
• Fixed issue where the “Row ID” field would show in {all_fields} and the merge tag output for Nested Forms.

GP Notification Scheduler (v1.2.5)

• Fixed issue where merge tags such as {user:user_email} and {user:ID} would not work in delayed notifications.

GP Page Transitions (v1.0-beta-2.5)

• Added support for soft validation and auto-progression when using the Consent field.
• Fixed issue where Page Transitions would throw an error if GFFormDisplay was not defined which could interfere with WP Cron events such as GP Notification Scheduler’s cron event.

GP Populate Anything (v1.2.25)

• Fixed issue where values from multi selects with dynamically populated choices would not have their values JSON-decoded. This could cause issues with querying on subsequent pages with fields that are dependent on the multi select’s value.
• Fixed issue where choice-based fields with dynamically populated choices and values could have a hydrated value that does not exist in the choices. This could then cause other fields or Live Merge Tags to not have the correct value.
• Fixed issue where empty array-based values (such as Multi Selects) were not used which could cause Live Merge Tag values to be incorrect in some cases.

GP Post Content Merge Tags (v1.3.8)

• Improved PHP 8 compatibility by utilizing OpenSSL cryptography rather than mcrypt if it’s available.

GP QR Code (v1.0-beta-2.2)

• Fixed issue with the bg_color and fg_color modifiers/attributes not being correctly converted from hex to RGB for QR codes.

GP Read Only (v1.9.11)

• Added support for Address fields using custom address types registered using the gform_address_types hook.

GP Reload Form (v2.1.1)

• Improved compatibility with GP Nested Forms by ensuring that the form field’s entries are emptied when the form is reloaded.