Learning Commons:Student Orientation/Working With Content/Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms can be used to create online forms that site visitors can fill out and an email notification will be sent to the author each time a form is submitted. An example of such a form could ask users to fill out information for an upcoming event.

Form Setup

Login to your site, if you haven't already done so.

Activate Gravity Forms

1. Select Dashboard -> Tools -> Plugins and scroll down to Gravity Forms. On the right, there should be a link to activate the plugin for your site (Enabling Plugins).
2. A new menu item should appear in the menu bar found on the left side called Forms.

Add a New Form

1. Go to Dashboard -> Forms -> New Form.
2. Create your form. Check out this video: Using Gravity Forms (video duration 4:23 min).
3. Save the form.

Optional: Confirmation Notice

1. Go to Dashboard -> Forms -> Edit Forms and select the form you wish to change
2. Click on the "Form Settings" selection in the gray header menu
3. Select the "Confirmation" tab and edit the confirmation text field
   • If you also wish to add any of the information submitted through the form (ex: name):
     1. Select the "Text" radio button on the "Confirmation" tab
     2. Enter the text that you'd like to precede the form item (name example: "Thank you, ")
     3. Select the form item you'd like to have appear in the confirmation message from the "Insert from field" dropdown
        • Your message in the text field should look similar to this: "Thank you, {Name (First):3.3}"
4. Alternately, you can also link to an internal or external page upon confirmation by selecting the "Page" or "Redirect" radio button respectively

Embed the form onto a page

1. Either create a new Page or Open up an existing Page. Dashboard -> Pages -> New Page or Dashboard -> Pages -> Pages.
2. Add the form to the page. Use the gray button in between the page title and page body. Note: This is shown in the video above.
3. Save the Page.

Receive emails from the form

1. Go to Dashboard -> Forms -> Edit Forms.
2. Mouse Over the name of the form you just created. You should be able to see a "Notifications" link, below your form's name show up. Click it.
3. Under the "Notification to Administrator" heading check off the "Enable email notification to administrators" checkbox and fill out the form.
4. Scroll down and save the form.

Test the form

1. Go to the page that you just created and fill out your form. Check that you received an email with the information you entered.
2. Check if the form has a new entry. Go to Dashboard -> Forms -> Edit Forms and check the Entries column, or go to Dashboard -> Forms -> Entries and select the form you just created.

Troubleshooting

Solutions to common Gravity Forms problems:

If you didn't get the entry email

Wait a bit, it might take up to half an hour to get the email. Check your spam to make sure it didn't go in there.

Do Gravity Forms support submission preview?

Gravity Forms do not support submission preview. According to this post, the submission preview feature was supposed to be part of the 1.3 release.

Important Notice

When using gravity forms, try not to store/collect any sensitive information. Sensitive information includes Student Numbers, CWL information, and private personal information. Furthermore, please don't use gravity forms for mission critical information; even though we keep database backups, data loss still might occur.