Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Discover new WordPress opportunities through stories told using Gravity Forms. WordPress developers and agency owners rely on Gravity Forms to solve complex problems for their clients. Breakdown explores their stories to extract the most useful lessons for our listeners.
Join podcast host Matt Medeiros with special guest appearances from the team behind Gravity Forms to stay up to date on the next opportunity for Gravity Forms + WordPress. Whether it's a new Gravity Forms add-on or a new way to use our e-commerce features, Breakdown is the WordPress podcast you want to be subscribed to.
Amber Hinds, welcome to Breakdown.
Amber Hinds:I'm excited to be here, Matt.
Matt Medeiros:Guess what? You're the guinea pig for the first time Gravity Forms is using StreamYard excuse me. Not using StreamYard. We're using Riverside, getting rid of StreamYard. So you're part of the whole new we're going to produce video for the podcast moving forward.
Amber Hinds:Oh, I'm so excited. Surprise. That means I could just share my screen.
Matt Medeiros:Yes. You could share your screen. That's why I sent you you you got about eight messages from me earlier today as I rerouted our link. But excited to you here. You've been on the podcast before.
Matt Medeiros:You've been on webinars before. You've been on our learn site before. I too have been on Equalize Digital webinars as well. But for folks who don't know who you are in the audience, who are you and what do you do?
Amber Hinds:I am the CEO of Equance Digital. We are a company that focuses on web accessibility. We do a lot in WordPress, but also a little bit out of WordPress. We have a plugin called Accessibility Checker that automates testing and fixing accessibility problems in WordPress, and we do a lot of accessibility auditing for different software products, including Gravity Forms. Who cares about accessibility, which we love?
Matt Medeiros:Fantastic. Fantastic. Didn't get to see you at Pressnomics this year. I looked up at the I looked up at the mountain that we climbed. Do we climb that mountain?
Matt Medeiros:We we trotted up that mountain last year.
Amber Hinds:A little slower than you maybe. I'm reaching the top.
Matt Medeiros:Don't worry. I looked at it this year.
Amber Hinds:In our defense, we did that after running a five k.
Matt Medeiros:This is true. This is true. I forgot about that. I did I I forgot about that.
Amber Hinds:I made you run a five k
Matt Medeiros:Yeah.
Amber Hinds:In Phoenix.
Matt Medeiros:Five k.
Amber Hinds:It was very hot.
Matt Medeiros:Yes. It was extremely hot. And we climbed what I consider a mountain because it was pretty high. But it was a good time.
Amber Hinds:Have hills like that in New Jersey?
Matt Medeiros:No. No. No. No. No.
Matt Medeiros:No. No hills like that around here. But it was great to, you know, sort of be there and listening to all the folks that are, you know, using WordPress and, you know, interested about the WordPress economy, running their own WordPress businesses. Before we dive into the stuff that you have prepared today, How has I mean the big topic at press conference press press conference was of course AI. But a year after the press conference that you and I were at it seems like people have a wrangle on, like, the impact of AI, and now they're just trying to figure out which lane am I picking here in the WordPress world for AI.
Matt Medeiros:Is it for development, design, copywriting, you know, agents and doing all this other stuff? How have how has AI impacted you and and perhaps some of the stuff that that you'll show us today?
Amber Hinds:So we are, like everybody, using a lot of AI at Equalize Digital. We I mean, we have a ton of AI linting and code review set up on all of our repos on GitHub and also in our IDEs. And our content specialist, I think, uses some AI to help with writing content, but we are very anti, like, just publishing AI written content because I think quality is going to win over weird generic stuff. And, especially on accessibility, a lot of the AI generated content is not super great. But I will say my background is that I was developer light before I brought in my partner, Steve, who's our CTO, who is actually a real developer, and our dev team.
Amber Hinds:And I used to do a lot of building of WordPress websites. And so I'm pretty familiar with PHP, but not so much with JavaScript. And I definitely have benefited more from AI code assistance. I think I'm doing more code writing and or like guiding AI, right, that in the past eighteen months than I did for a while. Like I had kind of stepped out of code, and AI has helped me get a little bit back into it.
Amber Hinds:Including what you're going to see today is something I totally wrote without our dev team because sometimes you're running fast, and I didn't wanna have to wait and get in line. And I was like, no. We need this, and I'm gonna get AI to help me do it. Yeah. Yeah.
Amber Hinds:I did get it I did see Steve submitted a PR code review of my my code when he found out I'm coming on this podcast to
Matt Medeiros:talk about it. You
Amber Hinds:know? So we won't say it's all 100% perfect. But
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. It's sort of like the student in, like, in in high school now who's like, hey. Write a paper about the book that you read, and they don't read or write anything. They just throw at you through chat GPT. And then that's then the teacher says, okay.
Matt Medeiros:Now stand up in front of class and tell us what you've learned. And And you're like, oh, well, I don't know if I did any of this stuff.
Amber Hinds:I'm a little better than that. Yeah. No. I'm just kidding.
Matt Medeiros:Global Accessibility Awareness Day twenty twenty six. You messaged me. You said, hey. I'd love to talk about this, not only because, it's a great effort and a great cause, that you're always working hard on, you and the team, but you're using Gravity Forms at the center of it. Before you show us what you're doing with Gravity Forms at the center of it, tell us about Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
Amber Hinds:So Global Accessibility Awareness Day is an event that was created fifteen years ago. This will be the fifteenth annual one. And the idea behind it with the founders was that they wanted to create a single day where a lot of people and organizations are all talking about accessibility with the idea that that will spread awareness on social media because it'll be a common thread. People will be using, you know, a specific hashtag on one day. Traditionally, a lot of Global Accessibility Awareness Day events are come to a webinar.
Amber Hinds:And we've been participating in Global Accessibility Awareness Day, probably for maybe, like, five years or so since we've been running our Meetup. And we were doing webinars. And last year, I said, you know, there are so many webinars happening this day that it's kind of hard because it's great that there's so many, but also there are so many people have to choose from. And then you get, like, webinar fatigue, you're like, do I actually wanna go to six web right? And and the other thing about webinars is they can be great for learning, but they don't necessarily actively change anything.
Amber Hinds:And my thought was, okay. Let's is there a way we can increase awareness but also make a difference? And so last year, we came up with the idea that we were going to host our own virtual contributor day for WordPress, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Instead of running a webinar, we asked everybody who normally works on WordPress plugins or WordPress themes or contributes to WordPress core to say, okay, on this day, it's always the third Thursday of the month. So the May 2025, now 2026, we are going to work on accessibility.
Amber Hinds:So that could mean you go if you're a core contributor, instead of working on whatever you normally would, you go look at what accessibility tickets are open for WordPress core. You work on those. If you are a plugin developer or a theme developer or somebody who just has a website, you're going to say, what accessibility things can I fix in my plugin, my theme, or on my website? These things that maybe sometimes sit in our backlog because we don't prioritize them and just say, what can I do for accessibility on this day with the idea that it will, actually create some meaningful change and impact? Last year, we had 86 people pledge three hundred and eighty two hours towards working on WordPress, and some very significant changes.
Amber Hinds:There were multiple PRs that were submitted and merged into WordPress Core in that day, a lot of people who said that they worked on individual plug ins that they had to make them more accessible, and people who just said, I spent a couple of hours writing alt text on images on my website, which is also helpful.
Matt Medeiros:You know? Yeah. I A
Amber Hinds:lot of different ways to contribute.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. That was gonna be my next question is is how can like, if somebody's not a core contributor, they don't maybe they don't own a plug in or anything like that, and maybe they're also nontechnical. Like, what what can they do to contribute? Like, you said here doing, like, alt text on images. How how can nontechnical or people who just don't have ownership of a plug in or core?
Matt Medeiros:How can they contribute?
Amber Hinds:So there are a couple of ways. One thing I would say, if you are interested in the theme side of things I actually decided this year, even though last year, I was like, we're not doing a webinar. This year, we are doing a webinar with it, but it's going to be more of a workshop. It's not a sit and watch webinar. It's a show up.
Amber Hinds:I'm gonna walk you through accessibility testing, a theme on wordpress.org. There are a 108 of these that have the accessibility ready tag, which have not been tested, some of them for many years. And so we're going, my goal with this is to walk people through, even if you're not an expert, you can learn how to test by testing and then give some feedback to those theme developers, and we can make sure that everything that has that tag still needs it. So that's one way. Another thing you can do if you're not technical that would be a really great contribution is on wordpress.tv.
Amber Hinds:You can volunteer to submit captions for videos. And, I have a link for this on our landing page. I would say start with the accessibility videos so that more people can access the accessibility videos, but you could add captions to any video. And there are automated tools that allow you to do this, and then you correct them, and you can upload the file, to wordpress.tv. On your own website, you could use our free WordPress our free equalized digital accessibility checker plugin, and it would scan, like, let's just say you said, I'm just gonna work on my homepage, which would include your header and footer in some global areas.
Amber Hinds:You could open that up on your home page of your website, and you could say, okay. Maybe I need to add some alt text. Maybe I could make my link text more meaningful. So instead of saying click here or learn more, I'm gonna make it say something like learn more about us. Right?
Amber Hinds:Things like that. Fixing your headings. So there's a lot of content related things. And even if you're only doing that on your own website, that would make a difference for however many users you have that visit your website, maybe thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people a year.
Matt Medeiros:That yes. I was gonna say, what like, let's package up a nice little toolkit, and you have the plug in, and we'll make sure that we have it, in the show notes. That's one great way that people could apply this. I'm just trying to think of a thing on the fly, which is very dangerous for me. But can folks do something like spin up playgroundplayground.wordpress.net, which will run WordPress in your browser, and you have network control.
Matt Medeiros:You can install themes that Amber's talking about and Amber's plugin. Is that a good way for, like from, like, one technical perspective, like, okay. I'm gonna contribute an hour that day, and that hour is I'm gonna test one of these themes. I'm gonna install it on WordPress. I'm gonna run Amber's plugin.
Matt Medeiros:And and then what? What what does that person then do after? Or is that really technical? Is then they have to go commit that to or at least open up a an issue on GitHub for that particular theme, or or plug in. Would that be the next steps?
Matt Medeiros:Or is there something, like, somebody could workshop that day and just, like, sit down and go, this is what I'm gonna do for this next hour, if that makes sense?
Amber Hinds:Yeah. So that's if you wanna contribute to themes, that is what the workshop that I'm running, which is gonna be at 10AM, US central time, three UTC. And you could do it in Playground. There are some accessibility testing tools, browser extensions that don't work well with Playground, unfortunately, because Playground for folks who don't know is an iframe. And so some browser extensions can't like, they can't they just test the container.
Amber Hinds:They don't actually test what's inside the iframe. So we actually have InstaWP has donated, sites to the WordPress accessibility team. And so at my workshop, I'm actually gonna walk you through this process of we have a whole, like, thing set up with demo content already, you don't have to waste time creating that. You can just spin up one of these sites with InstaWP. It will have all of the content that we expect you to be able to test.
Amber Hinds:All you have to do is install the specific theme that you're going to test. And then, I'll walk you through like, okay, here's what you would look like. Like, it needs to have a skip link. What is a skip link? How do you test if it has a skip link?
Amber Hinds:How do you test if the skip link works? Right? And so I'll walk people through all of that process. And then you would need to we have we have a process for creating, like, a a spreadsheet and documenting it. This is a big thing that I worked on with Joe Dolson over the past year was totally rewriting the accessibility ready testing process to make it easier for someone who's not an expert to do and to document consistently.
Amber Hinds:So we have a whole process that you go through. And then if you wanna provide feedback, you would actually post a comment on the track ticket in WordPress themes track. So you would need to have a wordpress.org account in order to provide feedback. But even if you just did the testing, if you didn't have that account, someone else could probably post that feedback for you on the track ticket.
Matt Medeiros:Alright. Here's another, crazy harebrained, idea. Maybe not. Maybe you already have thought about this. How can people bring their own tokens to the party?
Matt Medeiros:So how can people leverage their own you know, AI costs money. Right? Yeah. You know, it's one of the things we're all learning quite quickly. If somebody has a Claude code account or a Codex account and there's stuff to be done, you know, that stuff adds up.
Matt Medeiros:Could could people come and help with their own tokens, their own AI chatbot to help solve some of the the accessibility issues they find in a plug in?
Amber Hinds:I don't I mean, it's if a lot of WordPress tickets or sorry. A lot of WordPress themes and plugins have, like, GitHub repos, and they might have an accessibility issue tag. So if you were to go look at issues, like, let's say, WooCommerce has a public GitHub repo, you could go find issues that are tagged as accessibility and then probably probably Put Put your your agent agent to to work. Work. Right?
Amber Hinds:Right? Like, create a create a fork, create a branch, and get your AI agent to work. I think you would need to check it before you submit that PR back to WooCommerce. So this
Matt Medeiros:is this dangerous.
Amber Hinds:Think there might be a way to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Don't know if just testing if there's a great way to automate that workflow. But if somebody wants to show up at that workshop that I'm running and be like, here's how this process that you have that's super manual can be automated, I would love to hear that.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we're all, you know, I you know, just this is just sort of tongue in cheek, but I know that with ClaudeCode specifically, you know, there's all these headlines now of hitting its limits faster at 4.7. If, you know, if you're a ClaudeCode user, 4.7 is allegedly using more tokens faster than 4.6, so people hitting these limits. So, you know, I think the the cost of AI is gonna go up, like, the really good fast stuff.
Matt Medeiros:And now we might need to see, like, volunteers coming with their $100 a month accounts, you know, to help to help the cause. Right?
Amber Hinds:To use
Matt Medeiros:a little bit
Amber Hinds:their tools. Tokens?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's gonna be an interesting world we live in. Alright, Amber. I'll let you go ahead and share the screen.
Matt Medeiros:What you'll Mhmm. Show us is maybe how Gravity Forms sits at the center of the site and how you deploy that.
Amber Hinds:Yeah. So this is our landing page for Global Accessibility Awareness Day twenty twenty six. It's pretty much the same as the one I did last year because it worked so well. And one of the things that we wanted to do was give people the ability to make a pledge. So you can see right now, it says join 26 people pledging ninety eight point five hours to improve accessibility in WordPress.
Amber Hinds:And there's a make a pledge, and it jumps you down to a Gravity Form where people say how many hours are they pledging. They can only enter one to twenty four because, you know, we're not expecting that you have one of those reverse time spinners from Harry Potter. You have a max. Right? And then they can say what they're working on.
Amber Hinds:They put in their information. Name and email are required. They can register for our Zoom workshop and I actually have this set up with Zapier where if they select this option, it automatically just sends them to Zoom. I don't have to do any work, which is super handy. Job title company name, their website, and then an image, and they can either use their Gravatar or they could if they wanted to upload an image, let's say they don't have Gravatar, they can upload an image and set what their alternative text for the image should be.
Amber Hinds:And then they of course consent because what it does is it outputs everybody who is pledging and what they said they were going to work on. And the historical way that we would have built a page like this is they'd submit the Gravity Form, and then there'd be a custom post type that's like people or something. And then it would put them in as pending posts. And then once I reviewed them and published them, they would become live, and this would be like a post grid or post feed. But I kind of realized last year when I was setting this up that it's a little silly to save these people to the database in a custom post type when all of the data actually exists in the form entries and is in the database in the form entries already.
Amber Hinds:And so what I did, let me click edit on this page, is I actually created some short codes both to create this people grid and also to output these numbers because every time somebody pledges, I don't wanna have to come back and do them you know, be like, okay. Now I manually have to add this. So if you look at this page in the block editor, if it will decide to load itself up here I should have had this page that's been already set.
Matt Medeiros:That's an underrated, you know, opportunity for a lot of people is a lot of folks go right to the custom post type and custom fields for, like, storing this data. I think it's kinda like our muscle memory for being in WordPress for so long, and it's, like, sort of how we were all trained with WordPress and, like, you know, treating it like a content management system. But, you know, obviously lever leveraging entries, it's it's already right there in the database. Right? It's just calling that stuff right from there.
Amber Hinds:Yeah. And and if you think about, like, performance is mattering more and more, why would I duplicate data from one table to another in my database when it already exists? And, actually, one of the things I love about Gravity Forms is it makes it so easy to do this. So I basically have three short codes that I created, and we can look at the code for this in just a second. But the GAD pledge people count, and it has a Gravity Form underscore ID equals, and it's pulling from 73.
Amber Hinds:So there's one attribute. So that just basically says what Gravity Forms should I look at. And then I've got my hour total short code. And then down here below where my people are, I just have a a short code that's I called my pledge participant grid. And, basically, the way this works because I did realize I don't want to the minute somebody submits the form.
Amber Hinds:I don't want them to be public because what happens if somebody, you know, uploads a naughty image or writes something not very kind in their message of what they're gonna work on. So I set up this with a hidden field. Actually, wait. Let me go to that form. So I have this status field that is administrative only.
Amber Hinds:So it doesn't load on the front end at all, but the default is pending approval. And then there's an approved and a not approved. And every entry that comes in, you can see I have a few here that actually need approval, and I actually submitted one that I could just show you right there. I basically, the way I get them to show up on the front end is I do some, like, I review them. And you can if you just have Gravity Forms, you can click edit on any of these.
Amber Hinds:And this one is Sally Spammer who's totally fake. So, obviously, I'm gonna say not approved. And what's helpful about that is I could filter my Gravity Forms entries to only show me, okay, which ones still need approval. So if I just said, status is pending approval and I search, Because once you start to get a lot of them, right, now I only have to look at six of them. So she's gone.
Amber Hinds:I also see it's not just spammers. Like, this person, I guess, submitted the form twice within a few minutes. So, obviously, I'd only want to approve one. I don't want her to show up twice. So that's why it's helpful to have that not approved, approved thing.
Amber Hinds:And then for folks who have submitted it, what I'm doing here is I'm just, like, checking to make sure that whatever they wrote looks good. And then this one I've clicked before, so don't worry. We're not playing Russian roulette with images. I'll check their image. Right?
Amber Hinds:If they have uploaded one. I suppose there's a slight roll of the dice because I don't check someone's Gravatar image. All the ones that don't have an image is, like, they chose Gravitar. But I also if you have admin columns, this is kind of this cool handy thing. The admin columns plugin works really well with the Gravity Forms plugin, so I don't necessarily have to go in and click edit with Gravity Forms like that.
Amber Hinds:I could also just write in line and be like, okay. Now Jen is approved, and she had three hours that she said. So if we went back and looked at this page, now that I've approved her, we should see this jump up. There are 27 people. Now we're at a hundred and one hours.
Amber Hinds:And if we go down here, then we, should find Jen right there in our grid of people. So it's like this super handy, easy way to do it. I don't know if your listeners would care about code, but I'm happy to show you what those shortcodes look like.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Folks would would probably like to see that. Fun fact. This is not WordPress related, but it would be something that I'm just trying to think again on the fly. Dave from Gravity Wiz, they have, they have a free version of their ChatGPT add on for Gravity Forms, and then they have their premium one, which is under connections or their connector suite, whatever they call it.
Matt Medeiros:And I I do successfully use this is a a long aside, but OpenAI has a low cost content moderation model that you can call. Mhmm. And and you can use ChatGPT four o mini, which is really good at, image context and looking at the image and just saying
Amber Hinds:could be doing this for me.
Matt Medeiros:Correct.
Amber Hinds:Yes. And the other thing I might have been able to solve for I I thought about this later, but seeing this person who submitted it twice, there is a setting on, where's my form entry? Which probably I could just turn on right now that I really like on email. There, I'm pretty sure is something that says, nope. Maybe not.
Amber Hinds:I'm making it up. I could have sworn there's, like, a default Gravity Forms setting where I can say,
Matt Medeiros:like It's under form settings.
Amber Hinds:Allow an email address to be used once.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Form you'd have to go to the settings of the form. So if you click on settings of
Amber Hinds:I thought it was on the field settings. No? No. No. I already have that look.
Amber Hinds:No duplicates. I already have this checked off. So now that makes me wonder, but I don't wanna investigate because I don't wanna show that person's email. Like, did she use two different she realized that she used the wrong email for the Zoom, and so she resubmitted with a different email. But but, yeah, this setting is super helpful to help a little bit with the no duplicates.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. The there's also the settings which you can, set, one form submission per user, and it's just a cookie, I believe. So if they ever cleared their cookies, they could set it again. But, or Oh,
Amber Hinds:yeah. Well, that's that's kinda fun. That's over in normal form settings.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. So if you scroll down, should be
Amber Hinds:Does that require people to be logged in, though? No. It's just cookies. No.
Matt Medeiros:We scroll up. Enable entry limit right there, right where your mouse is. So that should
Amber Hinds:be But that would be, like, a total number of entries.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. But if you if you open up that as we debug Gravity Forms, if you hit that right there Yeah. Oh, I thought it was No. I thought I I thought
Amber Hinds:we'd accept the for you. You wanna accept, which is a super handy feature. Like, if you're selling something, you only have a limited number, like tickets. Yeah. But yeah.
Amber Hinds:Well, let me show you some of the code if you
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Show us the code.
Amber Hinds:Yeah. So, we will make this plug in public. I think it might be private right now on our GitHub. But I made this myself with some AI help. But, basically, it has some includes.
Amber Hinds:I think Steve had submitted some suggestions to make this more reusable for folks. What I'll note about this is that it is very much hard coded to expect our specific form. But I think you could look at this and pull out some thoughts about how you could do it yourself. So for example, I have the people count short code, and that's what says how many people have the approved status. And what we're doing here is we're just adding the short code.
Amber Hinds:And then in the actual short code, there's one attribute, which is what ID. And the reason why I do have an attribute on this is this is the second year. Right? I have two different Gravity Forms, one for each year. So I had to tell it what to look at.
Amber Hinds:And then basically, it's saying if there's no form ID, we're going to return and go back. Let me zoom this in a tiny bit and sort of fail. And then what it does is it queries the fields. So Gravity Forms has this field underscore filters, and, the key is the number. And that is actually when you're creating this let me see if I can go back into the form itself.
Amber Hinds:So when you're writing things like this, you want to get the ID number from your field. So this right here, how many hours are you pledging? This is ID eight. So so that's kind of what we're doing. But in this case, I'm looking at field ID 31, which is the status, and I'm only looking at them when the value is approved.
Amber Hinds:And then, basically, what it does is it gets them all, and then it just counts, and it returns a count. And in this case, I wanted it to return that plain count without any formatting because I knew I was gonna be inserting it into a sentence. If you're gonna have it on its own line or something, then you might have to have extra HTML tags, like paragraphs or headings or whatever. But that's While
Matt Medeiros:we were recording, Cindy pledged three or more hours. Did you notice that?
Amber Hinds:Just right there. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros:What was that? Ninety eight? It was at ninety eight hours before. Now it's at a hundred and one.
Amber Hinds:Oh, yeah. That was because I approved Jen. That made her three hours coming.
Matt Medeiros:Okay. Okay. Okay. Cool.
Amber Hinds:So it shouldn't change without me approving somebody.
Matt Medeiros:Okay.
Amber Hinds:Okay. And the the hour total is pretty similar. It looks like the same thing, where our shortcode, it's just going and it will get whatever ID for the form it needs to look at. It makes first make sure they're approved. And then we have basically where we're getting all the entries we're looking for.
Amber Hinds:So this is that ID eight that we were just looking at, and we're getting the count to get the total hours. And then it's just adding for each form. It adds up the hours so that it can output a total.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. That is awesome. So And then you'll you you're gonna make all of this available. Are are are people going to need a specific theme to run this? Like, is this only gonna be formatted for your given theme?
Matt Medeiros:How is that gonna break down?
Amber Hinds:So this specific plugin, it's it's a plugin, so you could put it on anywhere. There is a little bit if I I lost it here. So there are some actually, no. I don't even think I have styles in this. So you might have to nope.
Amber Hinds:There are so there are some styles on the people grid that would match our theme styles, but you could theoretically if you're like, I don't, you know like, ours gives them a yellow border and rounded border radius and all that stuff. If you wanted to use something like this, you could then, you know, overwrite the styles in your theme. I think what is most useful here, though, is probably getting like, just looking at this code as just an example of how you can pull out of Gravity Forms because, obviously, like, that specific form is our it's very specific to us, like, we're asking people and all of that kind of stuff. But I think what's most useful is if you're trying to figure out how can I get data from Gravity Forms, you know, looking at the form ID, short codes, and some of the things like field filters that we're using? And there's a lot of documentation on this in Gravity Forms documentation, but you can sort of see, like, how we're getting data and pulling it out.
Amber Hinds:And, basically so for example, to get someone's job title, we're just looking for a specific field, and you just use the entry and a open square bracket and then the ID number and then a closed square bracket. And then that, like, gets data from a field. I will say, this will probably be pulled in before we make this public, but, I hard coded all of the field IDs because I was building it for me and for a specific thing. But I did notice over the weekend that my partner, Steve, was like, well, if we're gonna show this to people, maybe we should, not have all the hard coded field IDs. So we're gonna try and make it a little bit more reason reusable for folks.
Amber Hinds:And we can also include the JSON file for, the import of this form into Gravity Forms if somebody does just wanna import this form and then, you know, tweak it a little bit for whatever their use case is. But I would say, honestly, me being a nondeveloper, just like a power user of WordPress is kind of how I consider myself.
Matt Medeiros:Me too.
Amber Hinds:Creating those short codes and being able to display the content from the form entries was pretty easy. And I would say the biggest thing you wanna take into account is, like I said, probably having some sort of administrative or hidden field where you can actually set them to be approved because I don't think you just wanna default display every entry the moment you get it on the front end of your website.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Yeah.
Amber Hinds:You know, I I think Security.
Matt Medeiros:Oh, yeah. Yeah. For sure. I think a lot of folks you know, I'm just speaking for myself. I I think if you're the power user like, know, if your ICP was to go after power users, not that this is, like, a commercial product for you, this particular plugin.
Matt Medeiros:But if it was if it were, a lot of us are are using some kind of coding agent these days. And I think the fact that you've built the framework for it, somebody's just gonna copy and paste potentially your GitHub repo and be like, build it based on this or, like, use my form based on, like, what their form IDs that they've placed in this code, but just replace it with mine. And people are just gonna talk to their code to have it, like, get modified. Right? So I think Mhmm.
Matt Medeiros:We're the whole open source world this is a whole other podcast. But, like, the whole open source world and how we're helping each other by sharing open source code is is changing dramatically. But also, like, it makes our lives a whole heck of a lot easier. Like, if everybody knows that you made this already, then they start with you. Mhmm.
Matt Medeiros:And maybe maybe the new currency is stars on your GitHub repo. Right? Where it's just like Yeah. We love following. To start with.
Matt Medeiros:Even if I'm forking it, like, this is the like, I'm paying tribute, you know, to, you know, Amber's, you know, main product, and then we're taking it from here. So it's an interesting world. But, yeah, this is awesome. This is great. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros:You know, and it's great to see it making everything so much easier for you and fun at the same time. Like, you're getting to code some stuff, but also it's like usable stuff like that headline to join 27 people, one hundred and one point five hours for those of you that aren't seeing the screen and just listening to the podcast. You know, we're looking at the website, and those kinds of edits took time before. Right? Or, like, a whole hell of a lot more, like, logic that you're like, it's not even worth doing.
Matt Medeiros:And now Well, even just can do fast.
Amber Hinds:Like, we were sitting here, we were you know, I see I've got, like, eight more people. If I had to go every time I wanted to approve someone
Matt Medeiros:Yeah.
Amber Hinds:Add up all this math, and then go change this number manually in my heading block. Yeah. That would be super annoying. Right?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah.
Amber Hinds:Now I can just QA them quickly to make sure there's nothing wrong. Hit public. I mean, we could do that right now. Yeah. Right?
Amber Hinds:And it'll just refresh the page, and it'll do all the math from whatever people entered in their Gravity Forms entries, which I really appreciate.
Matt Medeiros:So Awesome stuff, Amber Hines. I will link up the landing page, so that folks who want to, partake on May 2026, can do that. You can go right to the form that we just looked at. Click on make a pledge and pledge your hour, many hours, you know, to the cause and watch the numbers, tick up as Amber approves your, registration. Amber, anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks?
Amber Hinds:Yeah. I'm the main thing is, equalizedigital.com/gad,gaad,2020six. And if you wanna find me on social, I am most active on x at hey amberhinds.
Matt Medeiros:Awesome stuff. Everybody else, thanks for listening to another episode of breakdown. You can find us at gravityforms.com/breakdown. Search for breakdown wherever you get your podcast. We'll see you in the next episode.