For those of you not familiar with the GravityView plugin, the developers have helpfully made a video with a catchy song to advertise it. You should watch that before getting involved with my ramble about it.
Pretty good right?
The plugin is also decent. I quite liked its predecessor, Gravity Forms web directory (or something like that). But it was seriously clunky, to add a directory to a page you had to go through a ridiculous interface on top of the TinyMCE editor, which basically just generated a shortcode. There were just too many options on this screen as well, and some weren’t entirely clear what difference they made to the end HTML. To test that you had to just guess, embed the shortcode, and look at the end result. Then if it wasn’t right, go through the whole process again remembering the options you already liked. Seriously.
The new plugin is so much more flexible. By making the directory ‘Views’ a custom post type, not only is each directory (still embedded in a shortcode), a lot easier to edit without losing your progress, it also makes each directory reusable on a different pages. The plugin also gives a huge amount of flexibility with the blank HTML column, which also allows the standard form fields merge tag.
This was particularly useful on one project where I have three forms that feed into one an another (the three stages couldn’t be one form over three pages because of reasons…), and needed certain information being passed along via dynamic population and a query string. Before I was using a PHP function to fill this in a blank field post submission, GravityView made that a lot easier.
My only complaint so far, is that there seems to be an issue with embedding more than one view on a single page, but this is something I’ve brought up with the KWS support team and they’ve been very helpful and have promised they’re working on a solution for me.
I bought the Interstellar License which gave me three installs and access to all the extensions. The only one of these that I’ve actually used is Advanced Filtering, the use of which was crucial to the project, but also designed with the same Gravity Forms conditional logic, which was nice on a consistency basis.
This plugin, paired with the soon to drop 1.9 release of Gravity Forms (Save & Continue Later, YES!), and an honourable mention to Gravity Forms PDF Extended, remove any limits WordPress may have had as a CRM/Data handler.