If you, like I used to, you use a variety of plugins or even create forms on wordpress the old fashioned coding way then you need to check out Gravity Forms. It is an exceptionally powerful plugin which allows you to create both simple and complex forms with an essentially drag and drop mechanism – potentially saving you hours of time either coding or working with some of the less user friendly plugins.

The fact is however Gravity Forms is so much more than a simple contact form plugin – it has a whole bunch of features which allows you to create simple forms easily but also allows for creation of guest posting forms (guests can post to your site without having access to the wordpress admin – and the post is held for review).

Creating Forms with Gravity Forms

With its super sleek interface Gravity Forms allows you to build forms in just the manner you want them – all you have to do is select the type of field from the side menu and drag it into place before filling out the details. Its so simple I firmly believe it is accessible and userable by even the most technically challenged (obviously basic blog management skills being required). Each field you chose comes with a handy bunch of settings which you can tweak to get the field to behave just the way you want.

My personal favourites are some of the easy to set Advanced Fields – Name, Address, Date, Website specifically. They are as easy to setup as standard fields – but thanks to the highly visual setup you can get a feel for how the form will look before you even publish it on the page or post. Whats more is the fact these advanced fields come predegined for you – so no complex programming is required to create address fields

The real topping on the cake for anyone with a site which accepts guest posts are the post fields – which allow you to setup a form which will effectively allow users to make entries on your site without allowing them into your precious admin area.  All you need to do is manually approve the submission!

Setting up Conditional Form Fields

Ever wanted to add conditional elements to your wordpress forms but lacked the know how? Worry no more with Gravity Plugin.

You can create a complex and highly elegant form with very little effort – thus saving you the vast amount of time better spent elsewhere.

So, factor in the complex email notification routing, the ability to allow guests to post to your site, a whole load of other features and addons, you have an extremely powerful plugin in Gravity Forms which is infinitely more than just a contact form creator.

Pricing

The only drawback is Gravity Forms is not cheap. Pricing range from $39 for a Single Site Support License, $99 for a Multi Site Support License (total of 5 sites) to $199 for an unlimited Developer Support License.

If you are single site owner then the price of the plugin is just $39.99 which, factoring in the amount of time this plugin saves you, is really superb value for money. But if you have multiple sites, in this case more than 5 sites, you have to pull together $199 which is a steap price. I am not saying the plugin is not worthy of this price tab by any means because, in all honesty, factoring in the amount of time this could save a developer or webmaster in form creation it easily pays for itself – but some, who like to keep costs low, may think twice at that price.

Personally its a plugin I would highly recommend despite its price tag. Given the amount of time it will save you in site creation it will easily pay for itself in a very short period of time and leave you free to concentrate on the more instrinsic details of website creation.

Check out Gravity Forms for further details and save yourself time and energy in the creation of your next website project.