In this post, we’re going to take a look at how you can use Gravity Forms to accept author applications for your news site.
If you are running a news site using a theme like DW Focus, there’s a good chance that you rely on contributions from other authors to maintain a decent volume of content. Furthermore, if you pay for content submissions there is also a good chance you’re inundated with email applications from potential authors.
Wouldn’t it be easier if we created a form that allows a potential author to apply for a writing position by submitting their personal contact details and answering a few specific questions. All of the applications could be emailed to the appropriate person and stored in the database for review.
I think you’ll be surprised just how easy the process of creating a simple three-part form can be. It’s something that can be accomplished even if you’re using the most basic version of Gravity Forms.
Before we get started with the tutorial, however, it’s probably a good idea to take a look at the different licensing options. Which one is the best option best for you will depend on the specific functionality required.
Which Version of Gravity Forms Is Right for Me?
Before we get started building the form, let’s quickly touch on a little bit of information about Gravity Forms. As one of the most feature-rich and easy to use form plugins, Gravity Forms makes adding highly-customized forms to your website as easy as 1-2-3. Well, almost.
Even if you’re completely new to Gravity Forms, don’t worry, give yourself about 30 minutes of practice you’ll have a enough understanding of the basics that you’ll be able to produce your own customized unique solutions.
Right out of the box, Gravity Forms provides a ton of standard features (too many to list) but some of the more notable ones include:
- A custom form builder.
- Over 28 potential field types.
- The ability to create order forms.
- Conditional logic forms
- All form entries are stored in the WordPress backend.
- Forms can be easily customized with CSS.
- Forms are embeddable in WordPress via shortcodes, functions or widgets.
- The ability to create WordPress posts using a front-end form.
While this list might seem extensive, it’s really only scratching the surface. Plus, Gravity Forms is continually introducing new features.
Thanks to their strong one million plus user base, in addition to the extensive list of standard features, Gravity Forms has built up a substantial catalogue of add-on features that come into play at the different price points. Let’s take a look at the differences between them so you can see which one might be more applicable to your website.
Personal License
The Personal License is the most restrictive option at $39/year, but that doesn’t mean you don’t receive a ton of value with just the basic plugin. The three-part custom form tutorial that we’ll jump into shortly was built using the Personal version. Additional features included with this version include:
- Basic contact forms, multi-part contact forms, and captchas.
- Conditional logic forms, pricing forms and WordPress post fields.
- An easy to use drag and drop interface.
- The ability to measure the conversion rate of each form.
- Setting up multiple notifications when a form is filled out.
- The ability to email a single autoresponder to whoever filled out the form.
If you need a basic contact form or even several different contact forms on your website, this version can do it all.
Business License
The Business License version, at $99/year, solves one of the most frequent problems. Creating attractive contact forms that tie into email marketing software. Gravity Forms does a great job of simplifying that process by integrating with:
- Aweber
- Campaign Monitor
- Emma
- GetResponse
- Mad Mimi
- Mail Chimp and more.
Developer License
At $199/year, the Developer License is where Gravity Forms really steps up their included features. In addition to everything mentioned above, you’ll gain access to the following:
- Payment gateways including Paypal, Authorize.net, and Stripe
- Integration with several CRM apps including Agile, Capsule, Zoho, and Batchbook
- Integration with popular SaaS apps like Slack and Freshbooks
- Dropbox
- Help Scout
- Dozens of other integrations through Zapier
- Polls, Quizzes, and Surveys
- WordPress user registration and more
Gravity Forms are continually rolling out new integrations designed to make their product better and more user-friendly. The real test of user friendliness, however, is actually putting the form builder to use.
With that said, let’s jump right into setting up our form!
How to Create a Three-Part Form
If you’ve purchased and installed Gravity Forms and are ready to get started. The first thing we’re going to do is login to the WordPress dashboard and click on Forms. This will open up a list of the current forms you have created.
From there, we’re going to click on “Add New” as seen in the image below.
This will bring up a small window where you can enter the title of your form as well as a description if needed.
Then, click Create Form. You’ll now see your new form in the list of options. Hover over the name of your form and click Edit which will bring you to the Form Editor screen as seen below.
Before you get started with creating your application form, take a few seconds to scroll down and read through each of the five steps. Once you begin these steps will disappear, but don’t worry, we’ll outline them all right here.
While it helps to give some thought to the information you want to gather with your form before getting started, don’t stress about it too much. It’s easy to make changes and move things around as you go. Here is a summary of the information we want to gather from our prospective authors:
- First and Last Name
- Their contact information
- A link to their website
- Answers to several questions
The plan here is to create a three-part form that will gather all of our required information. We want the process to be easy, but also provide a small barrier to entry. If someone is lazy or can’t follow instructions, we want to be able to sort them out from the other applicants. If people forget or don’t bother filling out certain fields, it’s a good indicator of their attention to detail.
Page #1 – Collect Personal Information
The begin, we’re going to click on our advanced fields tab and then select Name, Email and Website which will copy and populate those same fields on the left side of our editor.
For each of the name fields, we want to make a few small changes. First we’ll make the fields mandatory and we also want the description to say “First Name” and “Last Name” to remove any confusion. To do this complete the following steps:
- Click the down arrow next to the Field ID
- Select the General Tab
- Delete the Field Label at the top
- Change the sub-labels Name Fields as seen in the image below.
- Check the Required Box
- Click on Update Form
Now, repeat this process for the Email, Website (I didn’t make the website field required) and all subsequent fields that we create. There are a few small changes with these other fields since they don’t have sub-labels so we’ll outline these steps as well:
- Click the down arrow next to the Field ID
- Select the General Tab
- Delete the Field Label at the top
- Check the Required Box
- Click on the Appearance tab
- In the Placeholder enter “Email Address”
With our first three fields created, it’s time to click on Update Form and save our changes.
Page #2 – General Questions
Now, we’re ready to start working on our second page. To the right side under Standard Fields you’ll see the Page Field button which you can click. This will insert our page breaks as seen in the image below.
With our first page complete, were going to add a series of questions on page 2 that we’d like the prospective author to answer. You could add as many as you like, but we’re going to add two so you can see the different response options.
For our first question, we want to know whether our applicant speaks English as a first language. Going back to our Standard Field selector, we’ll click on Checkboxes. By default, this should insert a checkbox field just below our page break indicator.
Clicking again on the down arrow, we can now enter the question under Field Label and the YES/NO answers under Choices. We can also make this a required question under Rules.
For our second question, we’re going to ask for a unique headline. Under Standard Fields, click Single Line Text which will insert the field under the checkboxes. In the General tab, we want to enter our question under Field Label and select the Required checkbox again.
Click on Update Form and then we’re done with page two. Of course you could add as many questions as you like using a variety of field types which could include:
- Single line and paragraph text
- Drop down fields
- Multi-Select
- Number
- Checkboxes & Radio Buttons
- HTML (which we’ll use shortly)
Let’s take a quick look at the two-page form we have created so far by clicking on preview in the Form Editor menu bar.
Here’s how the two pages of our form look so far:
Page #3 – Paragraph Answers
Next, we’re on to the third and final page of our form. For this page, we want to have our applicant answer some more detailed questions. We’re going to add two Paragraph Text fields, but you could add as many as you feel are appropriate.
To add our third page, click on our Page field again and Gravity Forms will insert the third page. Then, click on Paragraph Text in our Standard Fields Box twice adding both of our required boxes. Follow the same instructions described above for our Single Line Text fields. The one thing we did differently here was set a maximum number of character for each paragraph.
Once you’re happy with your questions, you can click Update Form to save all your changes. At this point, our form now includes all the questions that we set out to ask. In designing your own for you could choose to add any number of questions and include as many pages as required. You could also choose to place all the questions on a single scrolling page although this might not present the best user experience.
One last step before inserting your new three-part form on a page is to make sure your Form Settings and Notification Settings (the most important) are properly configured. Notification settings are responsible for specifying who should be notified once a form is submitted. You can create notifications for as many people as required.
Inserting the form on the relevnt page is simple with Gravity Forms. Just open up the page where you want to place your form. Click Add Form, select your form from the drop down editor, click Insert Form and save your page.
Wondering how our final form looks once it’s embedded on the page? Take a look at each page of the form below:
Page #1
Page #2
Page #3
Wrap Up
Hopefully, this post has shown you just how easy it is to create a customized form using the Gravity Forms Plugin. We really only touched on the basic capabilities in this example and with a little more time, we could create something even more thorough. There is really no limit to the amount of information you can gather.
On a news site like DW Focus, you could use forms for a variety of purposes including:
- Applications from writers
- Front-end article submissions
- Registering authors in the WordPress back-end
- Reader polls and quizzes
- Accepting article ideas from readers and more
If you’re currently using a version of Gravity Forms on your DesignWall based site, please share how you put the plugin to use.
