Using Gravity Forms in Agency Projects

In this episode of Breakdown, we dive into exciting updates from Gravity Forms, including the release of Gravity Forms 2.9 Release Candidate and the new Gravity SMTP 1.4.2. We also welcome Timothy Wood, founder of Always Curious, who shares his insights on using Gravity Forms for advanced applications, including a unique Magic Link login solution. Timothy discusses his agency's approach to leveraging Gravity Forms for data management and client solutions, as well as his commitment to giving back to the WordPress community.

Key Takeaways:

- Gravity Forms 2.9 introduces new features that enhance user experience and customization.

- Gravity SMTP offers a cost-effective solution for sending transactional emails, especially for agencies.

- Timothy Wood emphasizes the versatility of Gravity Forms for complex data management and client solutions.

- The Magic Link plugin provides a modern alternative to traditional login methods, improving user experience.

- Timothy's agency focuses on building applications within the WordPress ecosystem, showcasing the potential of Gravity Forms for advanced projects.

- Community engagement and contributions are vital for the growth and improvement of the WordPress ecosystem.

Connect with Timothy Wood:

- Twitter: @codearachnid

- Agency Website: alwayscurious.co

Support the Podcast:

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it on social media or your favorite community platforms. Don't forget to subscribe to Breakdown at gravityforms.com/breakdown for more insights every two weeks!

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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.

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Matt: 00:04

54321. Hey, Gravity Formers. Welcome back to Breakdown. Let's start things off with a few updates happening over at Gravity Forms before we get into a fabulous guest interview today with Timothy Wood. First up, Gravity Forms 2.9 release candidate is available.

Matt: 00:37

You'll want to test out some of the new features coming to Gravity Forms, including the new multiple choice field and image fields. I really can't wait for image fields to finally be here in Gravity Forms. And our orbital theme has also been brought into the editor. So if you're customizing your Gravity Forms on, let's say, posts or pages and you're leveraging the orbital theme, you'll now see that same look and feel happening in the form editor. Not the customized form look and feel, but that more updated orbital, default orbital theme view.

Matt: 01:12

You can get Gravity Forms 2.9 release candidate by logging in to your Gravity Forms. Just scroll down to the bottom of your dashboard. Gravity SMTP 1.4.2 is out. If you're an elite license holder or a developer license holder, Gravity SMTP is available to you for free. Make sure you download it and add it to your site to start sending transactional emails and your form emails more effect efficiently and leveraging platforms like SendGrid, Postmark, Brevo, and more.

Matt: 01:42

It's a no brainer to use this stuff, especially if you're if you're, developing WordPress websites for clients and you're creating sales, lead forms for them, donation forms, sign up forms to their membership sites, something that where that email is so important to their business, to their customer, you want to start using something like gravity SMTP to connect up to these, email platforms so that emails are delivered spam free into the inbox of not only your customer, but your customer's customer as well. In this new version of Gravity SMTP, we're making it easy for you to make the switch from WP mail SMTP plug in. So if you're already if you're paying for WP mail SMTP plug in and your Gravity Forms customer, well, you can save a boatload of cash by switching over to using Gravity SMTP, and the tool is built right into Gravity SMTP. So it'll walk you through making this seamless transition. That way, you can save some cash as well.

Matt: 02:40

And remember, our support team is always available if you have those questions before you hit the migration button, before you're, you know, start walking through that process. If you wanna ping us and ask us a question, feel free to do that with the support team. Last but not least, if you're using Salesforce or you have customers that are using Salesforce, our Salesforce add on has reached beta 1 point o. You can test it out and find it in, you guessed it, the Gravity Forms dashboard. Give it a try.

Matt: 03:08

If you're, you know, leaning into customers, at your agency, at your freelance business, and they use Salesforce, or you're just a Gravity Forms end user listening to this, you're like, oh, yeah. My company uses Salesforce. The beta version is available. I would probably wait for the, production version before you start putting it into production sites. But if you have a testing environment, we wanna get ahead of the curve as an agency.

Matt: 03:30

Testing out the Salesforce integration right now is gonna make your world a lot better, especially when these customers start asking, for Salesforce integration. To say the world of Salesforce integration, by the way, is complicated is an understatement. There's many ways that we found customers purchase Salesforce, sign up for Salesforce. They have vendors that integrate Salesforce. And the technical integration of Salesforce accounts can vary from account to account.

Matt: 03:59

And we've realized that, and we've built a checker tool that you can run to verify your account or your customer's account. I'll have it linked up in the show notes of this podcast, or if you go to gravityforms.com/salesforcehyphenconnectionhyphen verification tool, you can get it there or just search Salesforce connection tool on our site, and that'll you'll find it there or just click the link in the show notes where you're listening to this. But that'll run you through a little process. You're going to need access to the Salesforce account. It's gonna, you know, check some things for you.

Matt: 04:30

But that's just a a little handy tool to make sure that your Salesforce account or your customer's Salesforce account will work, okay with this add on. Next up, I'd like to introduce you to Timothy Wood. He runs a consultancy called Always Curious, and he's built a handful of unique solutions you can use with Gravity Forms. Like, have you ever needed to use Gravity Forms as a login form for WordPress, but wanted to use magic links instead of just the password login? He's built that plugin, and you can get it from him.

Matt: 05:00

Enjoy today's interview, and I'll see you in the next episode of breakdown. Timothy Wood, welcome to breakdown. I'm glad to be here. Talk to me about Gravity Forms. What are you doing with Gravity Forms these days?

Timothy: 05:18

So varied application kind of based on specific more client use. I run a design agency on the East Coast, and we do a lot of custom solutions, custom apps for companies and stuff. And Gravity Forms is a great way for data input in a very seamless way, especially with the way the hooks can be extended and allow seamless connectivity into other platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Commerce Tools, and then and some other data acquisition systems. So it's usually beyond just the simple contact form. If there's a if there is a contact form, Gravity Forms is usually my go to just because of familiarity and the ease of, like, 3 clicks and you're in.

Timothy: 06:02

But, for me, personally, I'm I'm pushing the goals to see what we can do for data input. Do Expand it.

Matt: 06:10

There's a lot of folks listening to this podcast who are freelancers running a boutique agency or, you know, larger agencies. I try not to make this podcast a total advertisement for Gravity Forms. Like, I want people to, you know, to to to learn not just Gravity Forms, but, like, the the greater good of either WordPress development or web development. Do you have a particular, you know, niche in the agency? Do you have a particular, like, client set that you're really good at?

Matt: 06:33

And if so, like, I I kinda hinted at it, but how does Gravity Forms help you sort of secure that type of customer?

Timothy: 06:40

So kind of from a historical standpoint, to add a little bit of context, I've used WordPress almost from the origins in the in the good old days to to now with a kind of a variation of customer bases. 10 plus years ago is more on the marketing and kind of low code or no code tooling for my clients to be able to manage their own content and just stand up tools that gave them a very attractive interface to work with from the admin side, but then also gave them a great marketing site. More in the last 8 years 6 to 8 years has been a focus on how do we actually build applications with WordPress. For as simple as the schema itself is with just the kind of key value pair on on the meta table and just the simplicity of post types and things like that, Gravity Forms internally provides a little bit more flexibility for addressing some content needs, especially with some of the add ons that Gravity Forms provides with, like, the Gravity Kit and Gravity Wizard and and a whole slew of others. Again, not to kind of, like, sell the the whole package, but the the whole package does provide really good integration beyond some of the basic schema pieces.

Timothy: 07:56

And more recently, again, last 6 years or so, has been how do we build either SaaS tools or how do we extend business functionality for customers into a more point and click interface to where they can manage the fields and the data management and the data schema and then let their customers their customers provide that data. Most recently, I'm actually working on a project right now that is in the construction industry where my client does financial forecasting at a national and sometimes even international. They breach into Canada and to South America as well. But they're they're looking at data trends and things like that, and we're using Gravity Forms for data input and some of the API connectivity into some of their other tools and then laying that into a WordPress interface to capture and bring data alongside of existing data. Basically, bring a coordinated and cohesive way to display statistical information about what financial pricing looks like in the construction industry.

Matt: 08:58

And and is Gratiiform acts as, like, that that conduit for, like, maybe, like, an API endpoint or are people manually requesting, like, information from grab like, where does Gravity Forms play from, like, a 50,000 foot view?

Timothy: 09:13

Yeah. So so in this particular one, there's, like, 3 distinct areas where Gravity Forms we're we're using Gravity Forms specifically. First piece is all of the ecommerce and subscription management for customers to be able to sign up into particular verticals that they are subscribing to, and we use the Stripe subscription integrations. And then there's a cool Gravity Stripe add on that manages subscriptions only. And so we've done some customizations to that to to be more cohesive with the layout.

Timothy: 09:43

But, overall, the interface for any customer self management of their act of their account is done through Gravity Forms. We also use Gravity Forms for data input in that we have some dynamic and automated tools that will pull in large volumes of data, 35 to 40000 rows of data Wow. In other processes. But this particular company also employs a moderation and vetting tool, and we leverage input through Gravity Forms into those big large datasets through kind of more manual intervention. And then finally, the third piece is the Gravity Forms interface on the API side is so easy to integrate into some other systems, and they use, like, HubSpot for some of their internal CRM and client management pieces.

Timothy: 10:34

They use a couple other APIs that we've built custom connectors to, and so we're using what I like to call headless gravity, in that we're leveraging the API form submission ability out of Gravity Forms to then push stuff into Slack and HubSpot and some other other systems through a form submission. So it's no user intervention and it's not a traditional form, but it is using Gravity Forms and it's using the benefit of their API.

Matt: 11:05

Yeah. That's fantastic. So it sounds like you're doing some advanced stuff. One of the things that I like to one of the ways I like to frame Gravity Forms, especially to new freelancers or people who are thinking like, okay. I've got this agency thing going.

Matt: 11:18

I wanna make a real run at this is the way that you can level up with Gravity Forms as an as a business owner, like as an agency owner. Can you remember when you started or when you stopped using Gravity Forms as just like a simple contact form? Like, do you remember what that project was or, like, how you thought about leveling up your own offerings thanks to some of the Gravity Forms stuff?

Timothy: 11:43

Yeah. So there there was actually a distinct project at least. I I don't even remember how many years ago. Many years ago. And we had I'd used other form tools for WordPress on other projects, and so I was I was kind of experimenting around with stuff.

Timothy: 11:58

Gravity Forms had just come on the market, and we were working with the Blueberry Growers Association of of United States. And there was a particular case where, they needed the ability to go back almost to the actual bush that that individual blueberry grew on. Not quite that granular, but just about that close, because there was FDA concerns over sal salmonella breakout or outbreaks where they needed to be able to surgically remove product from grocery store shelves with from farms that were identified to have unsafe handling processes and and policies and and procedures. And so the Blueberry Growers Association contracted with my agency and a and a PR firm to kind of build a tool out that they could give to the the individual orchards as well as give to grocery stores or distribution chains and things like that to track the the the life cycle of from Bush to consumer, to table. And so we needed something more than just a contact form, and that's where that that project is like, okay.

Timothy: 13:06

Let's open our eyes. Let's look around. Let's see what's on the market. Let do do we build it? Do we buy it?

Timothy: 13:11

And Gravity Forms met the needs for expanded customization for the forms, expanded your ease of setup with the fields, and and even the new form interface and and all the new orbital themes, stuff like that is miles ahead of what we started with years ago. So seeing that kind of evolve and progress has been amazing, but that was kind of the the the lynch pin for deciding not to continue to use other form tools. And even since then, they're about once a year or once every other year. We do bake offs and run some POCs for clients to see what else is on the market. So we we have done a significant amount of research, and Gravity Forms to date is still who we come back to.

Timothy: 13:53

And when I say we a lot of so I'm the founder and owner of the agency. I also have contractors that work for me. We have some employees and stuff like that. So it's not just me that's involved in this, but largely by my direction is the is the choice.

Matt: 14:06

Wow. That's a that's a I mean, that is one I like I would consider an edge case. Most people are like, well, we started using HubSpot, and we you know, Gravity Forms, like, really helped us elevate to that, like, next level of client. But, I mean, you built something right out of the gate fairly intricate, you know, using Gravity Forms, and that was many years ago. So that's that's awesome to hear.

Matt: 14:27

I found you on Twitter. You were talking about a Gravity Forms add on that you're building. Can you give us some insight into that? What's that all about, and how can folks find it, learn more about it? What do you do with it?

Timothy: 14:39

Definitely. So a bit of self promotion to start with. You can pretty much find me anywhere online as code arachnid, and that's c o d e a r a c h n I d. And so on Twitter, I think is how you found me. I had just posted a a link to my GitHub where, I've got a plugin for Gravity Forms called, Magic Link, and that has has been created because I found that we kept having kind of 2FA and just MagicLink login, that we just kept building that over and over and over again.

Timothy: 15:09

And I'm a bit particular about the login experience and the UX around how a customer can or a user in general can become authenticated and and access into systems. And so I don't like the out of the box WordPress login. I'm not actually a big fan of most of the add on plugins for logins. I I've done a lot of work with, like, Auth0 and some other outside of WordPress tools. And we we've had probably about 4 or 5 customers in the last year or so that don't qualify really for non WordPress user management.

Timothy: 15:49

And so how do we how do we elevate the the WordPress interface? And that management piece is kinda where we've been focused. And so one of those areas was MagicLink. We had a we built 2 separate mobile applications, and we needed that kind of behavior where we could let the user use their same device, log in to email, click the link, and auto generate back in. And so MagicLink was born from that.

Timothy: 16:14

It is refined enough to where it works in production. I do have another release planned before the end of this month, and that will probably sate most of the needs. It's pretty simple. It's just a few lines of code, really. But there's a lot of hooks in there where you can customize the messaging.

Timothy: 16:30

You can customize the integration points, and the idea being is that it would run-in parallel with either the Gravity Forms login form or build your own form, build any other page if you even wanted to have your own custom page and drop this Gravity Form on there that then will allow the user to put an email address in. If they have an email tied to an account in your system, it'll send them a magic link to which they just click and it will automatically log them in because they validate and verify that they have access to an email that's tied to to an account. Yeah.

Matt: 17:02

I just wanna zoom out for a second. The the magic link concept is instead of going to the website, username, word, I hit enter, I log into that site. The magic link is sent to the email inbox of the user. User goes to the inbox, and sometimes it's a link. Sometimes it's a code, like a a code, but or do you have a a a way to differentiate?

Timothy: 17:23

So it generates a code, and so then with the beauty of Gravity Forms, you can define or decide how you want that code to be displayed when because you're modifying and managing the notification. So if you want it to be a link, and that's predominantly how we've handled it, is that it you just put in the short code or the the the the merge tag for the magic link in your email, and then your user clicks that that link. It takes them back to your website with an authenticated. They're using that code to create an authenticated token and logs them in automatic automatically, for access.

Matt: 17:56

Fantastic. Do you always replace the standard WordPress login with the Gravity Forms on your projects?

Timothy: 18:04

Probably for the last, like, 3 or 4 years, yes. Prior to that, I was using some add on plugins that had, like, social logins and some other cool things that you could customize. But over the years, as more social networks have come up, it's harder to configure those. So we we do use a couple of custom plug ins that just do the social login, and then we handle all of the other login form. I've gotten to the point now where I don't even use the Gravity Forms login form shortcode.

Timothy: 18:32

I actually build a custom Gravity Forms to handle that for two reasons. 1 is we leverage Gravity Forms a lot for login. So, again, another kind of self promotion piece. I've got a the Cadence piece where Cadence WP, awesome theme company, they've got a event coming up and I'm gonna be actually demonstrating how MagicLink works, so find me there as well. But talking through how I build SaaS with Gravity Forms and Cadence And the login forms and the other internal application forms through Gravity Forms provides a great way to have system of observability to look at the health of your system.

Timothy: 19:11

You can do like, you can use AI to look at the volume of traffic if you have a high traffic or high use application and see the discrepancies of the data that's coming in and see if there's problems, or you can scale or ups or downscale your systems and edge functions if you're running on, like, Vercel or something along those lines.

Matt: 19:30

Do you have any opinions? I'm sure you do because you're you're you you I could tell just by your answers. But what what are your opinions on, like, storing this data in Gravity Forms entries? For instance. And I'm not a developer, even though I work for Gravity Forms.

Matt: 19:46

I'm in awe by our engineers and our development team. A lot of the times, I ran an agency for a decade. Let me zoom out a second. I ran an agency for a decade. A lot of the stuff that I built was with Gravity Forms, sort of how I ended up here.

Matt: 19:58

But I would I was always thinking of, like, okay. I I need to get data from Gravity Forms into the WordPress database. And now that I've been working here at Gravity Forms, it just never dawned on me that you would just use entries as, like, the source. Like, what what what how do you, like, conceptualize using Gravity Forms as almost like I'll just call it, like, a database layer, but you you I'm sure you have a better terminology for it. But, you know, working with that

Timothy: 20:23

That's a good that's good.

Matt: 20:24

Yeah. Working with that Gravity Forms database, like, how do you abstract that? How do you approach it? And, like, you know, accessing data, storing data, like you said, you use it for logging. Like, how do you see that as a as a as a cornerstone for, like, building a SaaS?

Timothy: 20:42

Definitely. So it's totally a cliche answer when I say it depends. And the the reality is is that the the factors that determine where to store the data are largely driven or from my experience had been largely driven on how and where that data will be used beyond the entry point. And so I really like the way Gravity Forms does their structure and their their kind of core schema per se, and it's different than kind of the WordPress post meta table, concept. There are oftentimes where I use my own opinion and actually set up an additional set of tables or a completely different middle tier to collect that data and store it elsewhere.

Timothy: 21:32

And Gravity Forms provides a really clean way to put data in transit versus data at rest. So kinda harking back to the login form, like, I don't store the user's password when they're when we have a custom login form, but I will use the Gravity Forms entry to store, like, the email address. And then we privatize the password field so it never it's never stored in the system. So from a security standpoint, it it's it's protected in that sense. But then there are there's also times where, like, we will hook up for example, on the login form, we'll hook up a slash Slack notification that when a user logs in, we'll get a notify notification on a specific channel if they're a certain type.

Timothy: 22:16

So, like, if a certain level of customer, if they've hit on or logged in, that will hit our Slack channel and then that allows some of our customer service reps to then be available if they need any specific, like, hand holding or concierge service on-site directly. So Gravity Forms' schema is great, especially as a form plugin. It's cool in regards to some of the things like GravityView when you come to build, like, a directory, and I've used that a couple times. I used to be a lot more opinionated about the schema and especially around directories, but as I've built more of those tools, I tend to look at more of the this longer vision or the longer road for where do we need this data and how can we make it more portable to the client in that sense. So, for example, in the case of this this current customer in the construction industry, they need the data to come back out of the system.

Timothy: 23:15

So they're putting a lot of input in, then they're augmenting it while it's in the system, and then then they bring it back out. And so we actually have, a mechanism to pull it back from Gravity Forms into a Mongo database that then imports into their analytical and statistics software down the line. So a lot of that kind of scheme of decisioning is based on what's the ease of movement through the systems.

Matt: 23:37

And then you have one throat to choke here at Gravity Forms. If things if things change in the future, we could talk about this stuff for hours. I definitely wanna have you back on breakdown as as you progress. What's the future for your agency? What's the future for this add on?

Matt: 23:52

Are you gonna do the the typical plug in route, maybe come up with some pro version? Any thoughts about that? What's it look like for you?

Timothy: 24:00

So I I will specifically say in regards to MagicLink, there will not be a pro version. This is just a way to get back to the community. We've spent a lot of time and hours on on my end vetting it, having folks that work for me implement it and test it. So we've got a lot of mileage under our belt with how this behaves, and I'm always looking for I've actually had, I think, some some PRs from the community pushed into it, so I'm always looking for ways to improve on it. So it it's not a necessarily a free plug in and as much as, like, there you do have to do a little bit of customization if you want to leverage it, but and so it will take your time and and to vet whether this is the right solution.

Timothy: 24:41

But it's a free as in, like, we've spent our time. We'll give it back as as best as possible. As far as the agency goes in general, we're always looking to to build cool apps and find new things. The Gravity Forms, as of right now, is just kind of one of our bread and butter tools. And so our desire is to stay within WordPress and to stay focused.

Timothy: 25:01

We largely, for the last 4 or 5 years, have been a WordPress only shop. And so that adds complexities to being so tightly aligned and coupled to decisions within the the community itself. And so we're we're looking at how do we give back to the community, not just from what we've taken, but also make this a better better environment for everyone going forward.

Matt: 25:25

Timothy Wood, thanks for today's interview. Where do you want folks to go to say thanks to learn a little bit more about you?

Timothy: 25:31

So selfless plug, like I said before, you can find me anywhere online as as an individual as code arachnid, that's c o d e a r a c h n I d, or check out my agency at alwayscurious.co.

Matt: 25:45

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. 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.

Matt: 26:08

Okay. We'll see you in the next episode.