Electronic Forms for WordPress at K
Gravity Forms is a plugin installed on the department WordPress sites (departmentname.kzoo.edu) that SCEs use to build custom electronic forms.
To start working with forms, click on one of the Forms icons, either on the dashboard menu (located on the left sidebar) or top the top toolbar
Need additional support?
Please reach out to WebServices@kzoo.edu to arrange a one-on-one training for Gravity Forms.
Expectations – Invest and Collaborate
Adding a form to your website involves more than just collecting user data. Beyond form creation, SCEs should prepare for entry management, individual form oversight, and learning best practices. Mastering Gravity Forms can be challenging, requiring both time investment and strong collaboration skills to ensure accurate data delivery to stakeholders. Use the following guides to assist in learning Gravity Forms.
Form Creation Guide
1. Create a New Form
- Create a form from scratch or select a template.
- Get to know the Form editor
- Understand your Field Options
- Learn how to navigate through the List Page
2. Adjust and Tailor Your Settings
Critical Information – Edit form notifications
If these settings are not adjusted and customized, SCEs will not receive emailed form submissions.
Form Notifications
Notifications tell the SCE or department (otherwise known as recipient) when someone has completed their electronic form via email.
All forms will start with a pre-filled admin notification so it is imperative that you specify notification recipients for each form that you create. If you do not adjust these settings the form submission will go to Web Services.
Here is how you can adjust the recipient of notifications and how to personalize notification messages.
- After selecting the “Form Settings” option select the Notifications tab
- Name: If you would like, feel free to alter the notification name.
- Send To Email: Under “Send to Email” all notifications will be pre-filled to {admin_email}. You will need to change this to the email(s) that should be receiving this notification. To add multiple e-mail addresses be sure to separate each one with a comma.
- From Name: Set the name displayed to the recipient when receiving the notification. SCEs can use the merge tags options (located to the right of the field) to select which fields from their form to insert.
- From Email: Insert the desired email that will be listed as the sender within the notification. If it is kept as {admin_email} the recipient can expect to see WebServices@kzoo.edu as the from email.
- Subject:This is the subject that will appear to the recipient when receiving the notification.
- Message: The message will start with the {all_fields} option which will display all of the form options set. SCEs can also customize this message and use merge tags as well.
Additional Notification Instruction
Confirmations
Confirmations tell the SCE or department (otherwise known as recipient) when someone has completed their electronic form.
All forms will start with a pre-filled admin notification so it is imperative that you specify notification recipients for each form that you create. If you do not adjust these settings the confirmation will read, “Thanks for contacting us! We will get in touch with you shortly.”
Confirmation Tour and Instruction
- Confirmations List Page – The Confirmation list page allows you to see all the confirmations for a particular form.
- Configuring Confirmations – Instruction to change your confirmation message, as well as create custom confirmation messages based on the content that is submitted.
- Conditional Logic for Confirmations – Instruction to use conditional logic to display information to users that is dependent on their selections within the form.
Best Practices
- Tailor your confirmation messages – Each form has a default confirmation message that states “Thanks for contacting us! We will get in touch with you shortly,” but be sure to adjust that accordingly. Useful information for a user includes:
- Consider using a merge tag to address the user directly.
- State that their form has been submitted successfully
- Next steps
- Point of contact for questions
Form Settings
Great job, taking care of those form notification and confirmation settings! You have ensured that user submissions will go to the appropriate party.
A nice feature of Gravity Forms is that you have the opportunity to customize each form that you create. Why is that important? Because having the ability to customize gives you as an SCE more control to make your process what you need. Now let’s learn about more general form settings.
Form Settings to Explore
- Getting There
- Settings Area
- Settings Sections
- Form Basics
- Form Layout
- Form Button
- Save and Continue
- Restrictions – to have your users login see the Require Login to Access Form section
- Form Options
- Save Settings
Require Login to Access Form (optional)
To require a user to log into your form go to Form Settings and check the “require user to be logged in” box under the Restrictions section. Add a login message such as “[login_link] to use this form”. The shortcode [login_link] will be replaced by a link to the login form that will bring the user back to the form after logging in.
Please note: if you would like to restrict your form to be completed by Faculty and Staff ONLY, you will need to restrict access to the page that the form is on.
Form Security and Spam (choose your option)
Spam Option 1: Anti-spam honeypot
Under Form Options, consider enabling the Anti-spam honeypot. Checking this option will enable the honeypot spam protection technique, which is an alternative to the reCAPTCHA field. When enabled, the honeypot spam protection technique will function automatically and will not require any user interaction.
Once activated, there are two additional settings:
- Create an entry and mark it as spam (recommended) – For this option, form submissions that are caught by the honeypot protection are saved as entries but will be added to the Spam filter on the entries list page and the form confirmation will be processed as usual.
- Do not create an entry – when selected, form submissions that are caught by the honeypot protection are not saved, and the form confirmation is processed as usual.
Spam Option 2: CAPTCHA field
The CAPTCHA field allows you to add a captcha field to your form, to help protect your website from spam and bot abuse by trying to determine if the form is being submitted by a human, or defeating a form submission attempt by a scripted bot. The Gravity Forms Captcha field is available under the Advanced Fields section within the form editor.
Which spam option do you use?
For forms that do not require users to log into the respective form page or those that do not require log-ins for the form itself, we recommend using the anti-spam honeypot and mark the “create an entry and mark it as spam” setting.
For forms that require a login, we recommend using the CAPTCHA field option.
3. Add, Embed, and Share
Although you have created a Gravity form and adjusted the settings, you still need to gather a URL in order to for others to use it. We do this by either creating a new page for this form or embedding the form on a published page of your website.
Instruction
- Create a page for the form to live on or edit the published page that you want the form to be accessed. If you are creating a brand new page, you might want to title it the same or similar to your form title. Additionally, assign the appropriate parent page if needed.
- On your respective page, use the Gravity Forms block to embed the form on the page. To share your form, simply provide the user with the URL to this particular page. If you’re adding the form on a published page, simply add the Gravity Forms block and you can set an anchor to help the user land on the header of the form.
Critical Information – Assign your headings
The Gravity Forms block automatically assigns the form title on your page as an H3. If you do not have an H2 leading to the form, you will need to hide the title through the Gravity Forms block settings (located on the right sidebar). You can do so by:
- Uncheck the Form Title toggle option. You’ll notice the title disappear in the editor view.
- Manually add an H2 above your form. A common option for this heading title is the same as the the form itself.
Entry Management Guide
View Your Form Entries
Setting up your form is only part of the form process. What you probably want most from that form are “submissions”, or what Gravity Forms refers to as an entry. Explore the documentation that covers all the basics of finding, reviewing and manipulating your entries.
Monitor Spam
Like with any other system, Gravity Forms is at risk of encountering cyber attacks. In order to be secure, we recommend that you select an option to fight spam and be diligent on reviewing spam submissions.
Critical Information – How to mark spam
At this time, SCEs cannot mark an entry as not spam. Instead, please send Web Services a request to mark specific entries as not spam by providing the following:
- Your website
- The form name
- The entries that should be marked as “not spam”
Export and Download Entries
- Hover over Forms on the left side navigation menu and click on Import/Export.
- Be sure the Export Entries tab in selected and select the form you would like to export entry data from. You may only export data from one form at a time.
- Under Select Fields check the fields you would like to include in the export
- If you would like to filter the entries by adding conditions do so under the Conditional Logic section.
- Select a date range (optional). Setting a range will limit the export to entries submitted during that date range. If no range is set, all entries will be exported.
- Click the Download Export File to export your entries into a .csv file.
- Note: The csv format (as it’s basically just a text file) doesn’t support multiple sheets and only the first one will be saved. If you require the functionality of multiple sheets, use the “Save As” option in the exported file and select a spreadsheet format like XLSX.
Further Related Instruction
Follow these links to access instruction and documentation directly from Gravity Forms.
- Creating a Form
- Using the Gravity Forms Template Library
- Form Settings
- Edit Forms page
- Embedding a form (Gutenberg Block Editor)
- Embedding a form (classic editor)
- Configuring Notifications (to you)
- Configuring Confirmations (to the submitter)
- Advanced Layout
- Reviewing Form Submissions
- Importing a Form – Useful for adding a form that you exported from your website or useful to add a form from another website to your website.
- Exporting a Form
It’s all in the details…
Gravity Forms offers many settings to make your field just right. Here are some settings that may improve the user experience for both your user and your department receiving the information.
- Input Mask – Input masks provide a visual guide allowing users to more easily enter data in a specific format such as dates, account numbers, and phone numbers. Gravity Forms provides standard input masks settings for SCEs to choose from or SCEs can create a custom input mask using the accepted input mask characters to meet their needs.
Forms Extensions
Various extensions are available to make Gravity Forms work even harder for your site. Options include configurable workflows, connected forms, exporting entries as PDFs, Zapier connections and other web hooks, and more. Please contact Web Services for advice, installation, and customized training.