A Gravity Forms First Approach

In this episode of Breakdown, Matt Medeiros sits down with Gil Amminadav from BrightLeaf Consulting to explore the innovative ways they're leveraging Gravity Forms in their business. Gil shares his "Gravity Forms First" approach, demonstrating how this powerful WordPress plugin can be used to create complex, custom solutions for clients. From building messaging systems to managing finances, Gil reveals how Gravity Forms has become the backbone of their operations, offering efficiency, scalability, and robust functionality.

Key Takeaways:

• The "Gravity Forms First" mindset: Always considering Gravity Forms solutions before looking elsewhere
• Using Gravity Forms to build custom messaging systems and client portals
• Leveraging Gravity Forms for financial management and ledger systems
• The benefits of consolidating data and processes within the Gravity Forms ecosystem
• Insights into iterating and managing form versions for complex applications
• Introduction of the Asana for Gravity Forms plugin, bridging project management and form functionality

Important URLs mentioned:

• BrightLeaf Consulting: https://brightleaf.info
• Asana Gravity Forms Integration: https://digital.brightleaf.info

Gil's interview showcases the versatility of Gravity Forms beyond simple contact forms, highlighting its potential as a powerful tool for building custom web applications and streamlining business processes. This episode offers valuable insights for WordPress professionals looking to maximize their use of Gravity Forms and create efficient, scalable solutions for their clients.

What is Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast?

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.

Countdown: 00:02

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Matt: 00:14

Gil Aminadov, welcome to breakdown.

Gil: 00:18

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Matt: 00:20

Brightleaf.info. That's the services website. Digital.brightleaf.info. That's where you'll find the Asana Gravity Forms add on. We're going to get there.

Matt: 00:31

I promise. But first, let's just talk. We were talking before we hit record. You're saying, hey. Before I, you know, I I joined the Brightleaf team and I was using Gravity Forms for a decade and I really wanted to bring this team into a sort of Gravity Forms first thinking method.

Matt: 00:50

Like, we know Gravity Forms. I think most people listening to this this podcast know that Gravity Forms goes beyond a contact form. But what what does that mean to you? And actually more importantly, what does that mean for an agency owner? Like that what I'll call like an insurance policy almost.

Matt: 01:08

Like you can slot Gravity Forms in because you know it's a trusted solution and that the team will sort of back it up. And I also promise this is not gonna be just a pure Gravity Forms ad. But what what is that Gravity Forms First forward thinking for you?

Gil: 01:22

Sure. It's a great question. So, basically, Gravity Forms First or Gravity First is just basically whenever we're looking to add functionality or to achieve some kind of, you know, delivery of a service, before we look outside of the Gravity Forms ecosystem, we first try to see if there is a way to leverage the tools that the Gravity Forms ecosystem provides, whether it's input, output, display, automation, whatever it is to, achieve that solution. And so, you know, with with the messenger service which you mentioned before, you know, we just launched over the past few months and we actually just made an improvement to it over this past week. So that was something where, you know, there there is a front end, you know, messenger service for WordPress out there, but our whole point is we're using Gravity Forms.

Gil: 02:07

We want everything to link into our system, which is a Gravity Forms based system from, you know, the the CRM to the applications to the contracts to, you know, every record and I can explain more about how deeply we go with Gravity Forms. But, basically, you know, we're already bought into the system. So let's use the tools that are here because they're really wonderful tools. And as I mentioned, before we hit record, you know, basically, the end result is basically like a web app. You know, it's you're we're taking something which is basically, you know, originally intended yeah.

Gil: 02:37

It was a contact form. But then once you're breaking down everything into, you know, data in, data out, you know, display, trigger automation, trigger workflow, once you're talking about that, you're talking about a web app. I mean, I've built forms which are all hidden fields and it's just, just the submit button and that's basically a button that does something. On the other hand, I've built forms which are all fields and no submit button and that's where you're getting functionality based on, you know, populate anything or whatever you tool you want to use to deliver something. So, basically, with the tools that are available to us, we found that with the gravity first mindset, we can build anything we need, you know, from messaging to referral programs to obviously application processing.

Gil: 03:20

But even more, you know, we do fund management and and all kinds of financial stuff with Gravity Forms. And we've really found that may you know, adopting a gravity first mindset not only pushes us to be more creative, but it also has been just rewarding because we've kept everything together. And so now the same tools that we're using, the same teams we're interacting with, you know, support teams and, you know, product development teams, all that kind of stuff, it's all the same people. So we have that continuity. And, you know, as far as from a business owner's perspective, one of the biggest selling points that that I had was that, you know, if what I made was that with Gravity Forms, it's all in the system.

Gil: 03:58

All the data is there. You never lose a piece of data unless you choose to delete it and then you have to click delete and then they say you want to confirm the delete and that's the whole thing. Right? So you'd never lose any data. And from a business owner's perspective, that's wonderful.

Gil: 04:09

So if you could if, you know, as I mentioned to you, we had previously before I got on, everything was distributed across the, Google Suite and there was third party, you know, automation platforms involved and data was here and data was there. It was across 20 different sheets and all kind of stuff. With the gravity first approach, we've consolidated everything into one system that uses the Gravity Forms ecosystem to take in information, to display information, to process information, and then to do all kinds of fun stuff like throw webhooks and, you know, send tasks to Asana and do whatever it is. So, you know, we've we're we enjoy pushing the envelope with a gravity first mentality. What can you actually do with Gravity

Matt: 04:49

Forms? Sounds like we should raise the price. No. Just kidding. We'll pay.

Matt: 04:54

I mean, it's good. Yeah. What I also heard there was a certain level of, efficiencies and scalability. I ran an agency for a decade and Gravity Forms was at the core of literally 99% of the sites that we built from the mom and pop shop that just needed a contact form to I remember building a pretty complex pricing calculator for a popular wedding magazine in our area where vendors could come in, they could put their prices for different, you know, aspects of a wedding, and then the end user visitors of the website could go through this, save the form as if they were building a price sheet. And I remember at the time, like, wow, this is something that makes my life as an agency owner, not a developer, but as an agency owner, I see those efficiencies and I see that scalability.

Matt: 05:43

In other words, if my developers were to leave me, you know, because we had a rotating crew, we're a young agency, getting people, you know, going to college, leaving college, etcetera etcetera. If from a scalability, like, I knew that this engine that powered these solutions was something that somebody could reverse engineer, understand. It wasn't somebody's super custom code that was like, oh my god. That developer is not here. What do we do now?

Matt: 06:08

So there was a level of, like, insurance inefficiencies there. That's my perspective. Do you kinda share that same perspective or do you have a different angle on it?

Gil: 06:16

A 100%, I share that perspective and that was also a big selling point in the sense that we're working with no codes developing. You know, if you take you take your browser take your browser screen right now, that's fields. That's fields on a screen. Right? That's you could have a mini browser going on with Gravity Forms and, you know, embed whatever you need to embed and have this here and have that there and you could basically have a no code software.

Gil: 06:43

And that was something that, from my boss's perspective, who's a very, you know, he's a tech savvy guy. He's not a developer. I'm not a developer. You know, we're not programmers. We have a programmer on the team to do code snippets when we need to but then to do the plug in.

Gil: 06:55

Right? But, you know, we don't, you know, it's not like he or I are particularly, conversant in in PHP. But the fact is that you can reverse engineer it. You can understand it. It's where knowledge can be distributed across the team.

Gil: 07:08

You know, we have team members that live and work in the Philippines and they're able to be brought in on to the same wavelength that the rest of our the rest of us are without this huge curve of, you know, going through a computer science degree and the whole thing. And at the same time, you know, when you talk about efficiency, with using a Gravity Forms first approach, we're able to build the system that meets our needs. And this is what we do for clients as well for, you know, for our nonprofit clients where we build their system that meets their needs. And you can't get more efficient than that. If you have a custom built, you know, scalable system that is nothing extra for you, it's just this is what you need in order to run your organization, that's something that every, administrator and every business owner can immediately latch onto and say that this is, you know, no fat, no pork.

Gil: 07:54

This is just what I need. And that's something that we found internally. And we found that, you know, sharing the the Gravity Forms ecosystem with our clients, has delivered similar results. So I totally buy into what you're saying that it's, you know, there's inherent organizational efficiency when you're using a toolkit like Gravity Forms.

Matt: 08:13

So originally found your, the Brightleaf story from the GravityWiz team in their spotlight series. I'll link up the the article, in the show notes of this podcast. One of the subtitles of this article is 1 on 1 messaging using gravity forms help paint the picture. You use gravity forms as a way to communicate with clients and it's a what I'll call a messaging system. You'll fill in the blanks, but a messaging system and it sort of gives you, your team the sort of, you know, the the bespoke features that no other maybe CRM is gonna give you, and it gives your customers a unique, more intimate way to communicate.

Matt: 08:52

And it's it's dialed in for your set of customers. Is that a fair assessment? And and what is the one on one messaging system that you've built?

Gil: 08:59

Yeah. No. It's I'd say that's a fair assessment. And, basically, I won't go into the technical details until you give me the go ahead. I don't wanna bore our listeners.

Gil: 09:09

But, you know, basically, what we achieved with the the messaging system is a way for us to directly communicate with our clients, in a way that is contextually relevant for us, and also has all of the conversational history in one place. And in order to do that, you know, we had to just basically think about what is communication, What is really, you know, when you open up your messenger on your phone, what are you really doing? What are you really interacting with in terms of user experience? And then when that data is stored and then subsequently displayed, what's really going on there? Meaning, you know, what is a messaging system if not just like a bulletin board where only certain messages are visible to certain people?

Gil: 09:53

Right? So when you put something like it in those terms, then Gravity Forms really presents itself as like a natural solution. One of the things I was really thrilled about when we finally just hit it was that, like, this is a simple solution that anyone can implement. You know, with something like Gravity Forms, the powerful engine as you put it like Gravity Forms, you can very simply implement messaging. And the the improvement I mentioned before the show that we had just, deployed this week is we actually now turned it into a we added a broadcast element to it as well.

Gil: 10:22

Meaning, not only can we do one to one messaging, which is very important because that gives us again the conversational history. And by the way, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, but I was act as part of giving that contextually relevant kind of conversation history, I actually embedded a gravity view in a gravity form.

Matt: 10:41

This is inception all over again.

Gil: 10:43

It's it's total inception. Using live merge tags to filter the gravity view so it's relevant to what you're seeing on that form. You know, you can do amazing things. But, basically, this past week, we we added a broadcast element to it. Where basically it's the same simple principles where if, you know, if you're if things are filtered by usernames.

Gil: 11:01

Right? So then just change usually make a username for the user role and then filter by the user role. Okay. So we needed to code a little custom snippet so the user role merge tag plays nice and fine. So we got, you know, our developer to do a nice custom snippet and we put that on our GitHub repository and everyone else can download that and implement it for themselves, and we hope that everyone does.

Gil: 11:18

But, basically, that's the idea behind the messaging system. You know, it's a great way to consolidate client communication. It's a great way for people to know what's the, you know, a guarantee way. Like, if you tried to reach us through, you know, the 1,000 emails we're processing or whatever the case may be, we will get back to you as soon as we can, but that might be tomorrow. It might be in 2 days, you know, you know, you get some kind of response, but it's not gonna be like if you get through us to the messaging system, well, there's always team members monitoring the messaging system, working with the, you know, filling the workflow, you know, that kind of stuff.

Gil: 11:48

And this direct con clients know the best way to reach us is the is through this. You know, this puts it right in front of our faces. We use gravity flow to put it in the my tasks, inbox, on the front end. And we just got total visibility now in all client communications. Nothing gets lost.

Gil: 12:04

And, you know, you can even play with it more. I mean, why it's so it's a simple thing to implement that people can really have fun with it. If you wanna if you in someone's, use case, they wanna have, files uploaded, you know, as part of that and have files available in the conversation history. Fine. Add in a file field.

Gil: 12:21

Add in a file upload field. Now you've got files as part of your conversation history. You know, there's so much you can do with that. But, one of the things I love about this this ecosystem, I really wanna say this community, is that these ideas don't emerge in a vacuum. And, you know, even though this was something we've been working on for months, you know, I first got into my head, like, it'd be really nice if we'd have the messaging.

Gil: 12:41

And I got hung up on a technical aspect of it, and I was trying to figure out how we got threaded conversations and whatever. There was a dead end. But seeing the the highlight in the Gravity Wiz publication, I was like, oh, someone else is doing client portal. Oh, let me think about the client portal. That's really one to 1.

Gil: 12:55

It's not something we need to have a broadcasting. You don't really need threaded messages, the whole thing. Oh, it's even better if you have everything there together. One thing follows another, and we can really build on what each other is doing, to achieve some really great stuff. So a lot of the spirit that's at, you know, motivating us and Brightleaf, you know, in our sharing and giving back to the community, is that we really wanna see a vibrant Gravity Forms community where people are developing wild stuff, cutting edge stuff with Gravity Forms, sharing the results with each other and saying, here's how you do it.

Gil: 13:26

Because so far, it's blown our minds what you can do with Gravity forms.

Matt: 13:30

You mentioned no code before. I mean, that's a direction that let's say, I mean, you could argue all of WordPress is headed, right, with like core Gutenberg blocks and be able to move information around a screen. And then I'm sure as they mature the like, query block functionality, you really start to, you know, empower end users who can't write a PHP MySQL query to display content. They'll be able to do it right in their right in their WordPress dashboard, and Gravity Forms ecosystem has those same capabilities through Gravity Kit. Gravity Wiz has a, entries display add on as well.

Matt: 14:07

All of that is getting to from that no code perspective, how do you manage the front end of this solution? Do do you have a theme you turn to that says this is actually a WordPress theme that is hey, this is great for displaying this dynamic content. Or is that that last mile for you where you say, okay, I pull in a front end designer to, you know, write the template create the templates and lay out the data the way that we need it to look?

Gil: 14:32

That's a great question. Especially since we have yet to pull in a a real graphic designer. We've been, pinch hitting, on our team for those those kinds of things. I'll tell you, it's there's 2 elements to your question. There's the no code aspect and then there's the question of how what is the learning curve required to actually design with, you know, gravity view, let's say, you know, in its current state.

Gil: 14:58

You know, it would be great if the UX on a gravity view or on a gravity form allowed more for more styling. That would be, you know, that would make my boss thrilled, you know, if anyone's listening. That'd make my boss thrilled. But just from anyone's perspective, it's easier to, you know, type in a number and move a sliding bar, you know, on a on a on a parameter than it is to figure out the ID and figure out the code and figure out, you know, what it is that you actually have to specify. That said, we do all of our design through CSS.

Gil: 15:29

We use generate press as our theme. They're basics. I'm not saying our sites are gonna win any awards for visual design, But they look good. They look sleek. The user experience, especially on the dashboard side, the client portal side is very, very good.

Gil: 15:46

And we found that the documentation that is offered for, you know, IDs, classes, and elements in the through GravityView and through Gravity Forms and, you know, the ability to add custom CSS classes, we make good use of that stuff. Now there is I should point out there is a a something called styles and layouts for Gravity Forms, which we also use. That's more of a a UI for styling forms. So, like, that kind of stuff. My boss loves playing with that and, you know, setting the border on this field like that much and then putting that thing.

Gil: 16:18

It looks good. I'm not you know, I I can't I have no judgment in this kind of thing. So I just care about the functionality of it. But, you know, even even that said, you know, it's amazing just with a basic list view in, you know, gravity view, the list view type, and then how all of the elements are given and use all their classes. And here we can just call it very specifically, okay.

Gil: 16:36

Set the border for this, set the radius for that, you know, give me that color, pull it from here, you know, it all works so well. And the fact that there's so many opportunities to add in the custom CSS, you know, on the view level or as, like I said, as a class then define the class through the customize or whatever it is. You know, it's something where you don't really need I, you know, if you have a theme that works for you, great. You know, I'm confident that Gravity Forms works with everything. So, you know, like, that's fine.

Gil: 17:03

But the truth is that it's CSS isn't hard. You know, I think we all remember the days on GeoCities and we were, like, when it was just all HTML and you were typing in, you know, set the background color to blue, you know? But now it's, you know, all through whatever it is. And, you know, CSS, you know, the the limited amount of CSS that you need to have in order to run that extra mile with Gravity Forms is totally attainable, I think, for most basic web developers. In this day and age, you know, it's doable.

Gil: 17:31

That said, would it be great if there's a UX for it? Absolutely. You know, if there's a UI, but, you know, you know, it's, you don't need it.

Matt: 17:39

I wanna get to the, Asana, for Gravity Forms plugging in a second. But one last question about this messaging platform. How do you manage and this might be one of the maybe speed bumps along the way, but how do you manage iterating on these, what I'll call, like these little mini web apps, these little mini SaaS apps that you're building with gravity Gravity Forms. How do you iterate on that and let's say roll back a version or abstract like function like a hard coded functionality to what Gravity Forms gives you. Like, are you constantly making version 1 of a Gravity Form and then version 2 comes out, you hide version 1 and launch version 2 and launch version 2 in there.

Matt: 18:20

Like, how how do you manage that sort of typical workflow that you might have with a GitHub deployment workflow? But now it's like, oh, these are little forms that we can just plop right onto a page. How do you manage iterating on that software?

Gil: 18:34

Yeah. It's a great question. You know, there's different approaches to that. There's Gravity Connect. Mhmm.

Gil: 18:42

There's a u, you have put out a a a plugin for managing forms across sites and that kind of stuff and so, that's one direction you could go in. We take a little more by the seat of your pants approach that is, by the same time, limited by certain operational constraints. We can't actually deploy multiple versions of a form entirely, because that would screw with our data tables, you know, our database. You know, we're we're treating these forms like tables themselves so unless we just copied all the entries from one form to the next and then mapped those and figured out, you know, what values had to be filled in, we'd be at a disadvantage. So when we iterate, we do so thoughtfully.

Gil: 19:27

We test everything that we're trying to do externally on We test everything that we're trying to do externally on other forms first. Like, I have 15 different test forms which are at different stages of testing functionality and seeing how we can really and when it comes to planning out the iterations because really, you know, the plan is half the the battle here, we actually use a Sprint process. So, just like we have the Sprint process for the plug in itself, we have a Sprint for a Sprint process for our our service deployment and for, you know, everything everything down to, like, the confirmation message is, you know, ironed out ahead of time, and that saves us a lot of headache afterwards trying to figure out what went wrong. Now, that said, there is a certain kind of when you're flowing in the experience of building anything, you know, digital, physical, whatever it is, you know, you come in with a plan and you come in with a set of this is how it's gonna go and then things just happen. You know, it turns out one feature doesn't work exactly the way you planned or even tested and there's now some new factor that's at play or it turns out that, you know, you can go up, you know, you can have a workflow that covers steps a, b, c, but then in between steps a and b, you realize, oh my god, we need to have a second step there.

Gil: 20:41

You know, we didn't see it, you know, or it was caused by the fact that we need to split this value across 2 fields and now we have to choose which field we're going with. But whatever the case is, you know, there's a certain amount of, okay, we're gonna it's a it's a work in development. It's a work in progress. And so, you know, when you you get into the development, you come into the best of plan, and still you have to make tweaks along the way. So then it's just a question of making sure that your master template reflects, you know, what are those changes you made, and we actually use, a handy GravityWiz snippet for, field admin notes where you can put in admin notes on the field level in the form builder and that just helps us to keep track of, you know, why are some very crazily configured fields configured that way.

Gil: 21:22

There is a rhyme and there is a reason and allows us to handle it. But before we jump in to the plug in actually I wanted to share something else that we're doing if you don't mind, which is another direction which we've taken Gravity Forms and was actually kind of the groundwork for the messaging system, because the messaging system, if you think about it, is basically a type of ledger and the ledger approach to Gravity Forms is something that we've done a lot with. We manage a lot of finances for our clients, you know, through different bank accounts and different organizations, and this kind of stuff, and we have an internal record of all of their funds, all of their incoming funds, all of their, you know, accumulated funds, and all of their dispersed funds. All of that is run through Gravity Forms. We use Gravity Math.

Gil: 22:08

We use Gravity Views. We use Gravity, forms, obviously, for the, you know, the manage the UI and all that kind of stuff. But we're actually a by thinking in terms of, you know, in and out ledger transactions, you know, here's an entry that's this type, here's an entry that's that type, and just line them all up. We're actually able to manage, you know, a sizable amount of funds, you know, very cleanly, very easily. Everyone sees exactly what's coming in, what's projected to come in, but has yet to be confirmed through gravity flow, what has been, you know, projected to go out but has yet to be approved, you know, we get totals, you know, you can filter the totals by dates and there's all kinds of stuff and it's all done through Gravity Forms, you know, we're basically setting up, you know, an internal accounting system.

Gil: 22:53

It's not double entry. Could be you could do double entry with Gravity Forms or take an extra database table or 2, but, you know, but we're actually able to do it and so is that ledger thinking in terms of trend a ledger of transactions, Gravity Forms. We we have we have for for our for our funds and our accounts, we have, you know, the actual application for the fund, which is, like, how the user interacts with it, you know, the client interacts with their fund on the on the client portal. And then we have, like, dispersal forms, okay, and then we have, you know, incoming third party funds, okay, but then we also just have a ledger. We have a pure ledger for every type of service that we do, and that's just tracking in and out and once you think and now a ledger is such a simple thing.

Gil: 23:35

Everyone's like, okay. What's the big deal? What's about a ledger? That's like the wheel. It changes the ballgame.

Gil: 23:40

Now we're talking about a whole different level of accounting and we have aims at, by the way, about building out all business services through a Gravity Forms site. I mean, we think that there's nothing that can be done that business needs to do that can't be done through a properly equipped, you know, properly outfitted Gravity Forms site. So that's just one last point I just wanted to share before we talk about the plug in but, you know, whether it's messaging, whether it's, you know, referral program, whether it's, account management and fund management, Gravity Forms has provided solutions every step along the way. And it's amazing what you can do with these tools. Simply amazing.

Matt: 24:17

I paused there because that's gonna be the sound bite that I take for the for the Super Bowl ad when we actually air it one day. There's one of one of the thing I wanted to jump into, before we get to the Asana plug in. There there's a great and I don't know if maybe you already use it, but I just featured this. I think it was, like, last week or the or maybe it was this week. I can't remember.

Matt: 24:39

GravityKit has, their gravity revisions add on, which is fantastic because that allows you to see yeah. To see the revisions of, you know, hey, you add a field in and all of a sudden that's a new revision of Gravity Forms, of the Gravity Form itself. Right? So anyone listening to this and maybe not doing something as as complex as, the messaging app, if you're just making minor adjustments and you you're working with a group of people on on a WordPress website, that is another fantastic plugin that'll show you those changes. Okay.

Matt: 25:09

So Yeah. Asana, you use that internally to to track projects. Is this really the the the bigger question in in terms of the Gravity Forms ecosystem? I'm looking at the website. Again, it's digital.brightleaf.info.

Matt: 25:24

You'll see the little, integrate Asana with Gravity Forms link up top. You can download a free version. You can download a premium version. Are we going to see more premium add ons? Is this the first foray into becoming a certified developer in the Gravity Forms ecosystem?

Gil: 25:44

It would be an honor. Yeah. So basically, our we we develop everything in house first for internal use. That's our our initial criterion is that, you know, we're we didn't get into the business of being, you know, gravity forms developers. We have a consulting business, and we're just trying to be smart about how we go about it.

Gil: 26:02

That said, you know, we do some pretty gnarly stuff with code, you know, through our our GitHub repository, like I mentioned before, has the snippets that we put out there in terms of just tweaking this, tweaking that to deliver 10 times more functionality with the Gravity Forms tools that are there. And then that extra mile, when we come across something that, you know, like the Asana plug in, there was an Asana plug in years ago that just when Asana switched their authentication system and they went to OAuth and everything like that, plug in wasn't maintained as much and everything and it stopped functioning and so, basically, there was nothing out there. We had a need for this and we figured we can't be the only ones. You know, there's plenty of people using Gravity Forms, plenty people using Asana, and it's such a an important thing for project management, you know, it's getting back to, you know, client portals and, you know, the whole workflow process of onboarding clients and delivering services to them and all kind of stuff. You know, Asana is a big part of that.

Gil: 26:58

Gravity Forms is great. It's not gonna replace a project management suite anytime soon. That's something to think about, but, you know, right now Asana meets a lot of needs, that know, Gravity Forms is not there to fill. So when it comes to when it comes to integrating the 2, that should have been a no brainer for her, you know, that that that for us was just like, you know, we need just immediately to build this bridge. So the bridge actually from Gravity Forms end was very easy to build.

Gil: 27:28

From the Asana end was much more difficult. Again, I'm I was not the lead developer on the project. I'm not a developer. You know, we where took our lead developer. We're taking him out to dinner, to congratulate him on his first, you know, real plug in, and for, getting into directory into the Gravity Forms certified.

Gil: 27:48

But the Gravity Forms

Matt: 27:50

document Hold off on that dinner until he has to actually answer support tickets from from customers.

Gil: 27:56

Right. Right. Right. Well, no. He's he's a good guy.

Gil: 28:01

He's, you know, he's I'm I'm confident in him. I'm very confident in him. But, no. It's we're looking forward to seeing what problems people come up with and also, you know, give us some good direction in terms of how we wanna continue developing the UX and, you know, developing features and, you know, figuring out what are the most efficient ways to code this plug in. But, you know, once we put it out once we put it out there, you know, we realize that this is the kind of thing where, you know, we want to this is a good spin off for us to get into.

Gil: 28:31

Meaning, this is a good, you know, it grows naturally and organically from our internal operations. We have the resources to deliver on this. You know, let's take the best of what we're working with and we're developing internally, go that extra mile to add, you know, the the extra features for, you know, a a wide user base and then a premium level, and then, you know, just keep see what happens with that.

Matt: 28:57

It's been a fantastic conversation. I I really obviously enjoyed, everything that you had to say about building out this platform is the the the forward thinking Gravity Forms, concept for the agency. Once again, I'll reiterate the URLs brightleaf.infoanddigital.brightleaf.info if you wanna check out that Gravity Forms. You know, anything else that you want to add, as a resource for folks in the community? Or are are you doing anything on the community side like, I don't know, Gravity Forms meetups or where do you coalesce on the web to talk about Gravity Forms in your world?

Gil: 29:32

First of all, we're trying you know, we make good use of the informational resources out there, including what's on, you know, the sites as well as, like, the Facebook groups. You know, those are pretty lively and dynamic. We're also trying to organize actually, here in Jerusalem, we're trying to organize a, a countrywide, WordPress developers, maybe hopefully build a little piece in the area. I don't know if you've been following the news, but it's a little hairy right now and, you know, we're trying to bring groups together, you know, Israeli, Palestinian, and maybe, you know, come together around WordPress and around the the, you know, the Gravity Forms banner or something like that. But, yeah, we're pretty active in that, and, we're trying to give back.

Gil: 30:15

We're gonna start a blog soon that explains all the gaps that we found in the Gravity Forms documentation. And, you know, you know, if we find any specific techniques like the messaging system, we wanna share those with the community and contribute those to conversation. And, look forward to seeing everyone on Facebook because that's those groups are invaluable.

Matt: 30:36

Yeah. Fantastic stuff, Gil. Thanks for hanging out today. That's it for today's episode. If you could do one more thing for me today, share this episode on social media, your favorite Facebook group or Discord channel.

Matt: 30:49

Spread the word about this podcast. It really helps. If you haven't added breakdown to your favorite podcast app, point your browser to gravityforms.com/breakdown and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every 2 weeks. Okay. We'll see you in the next episode.