New Email Customizer + Making Gravity Better
Welcome back dear listener, excited to be chatting with you again.
Later in today’s episode you’ll hear from Joe Anderson who’s building a new product for Gravity Forms so that you can customize your outgoing email templates. If you do a lot with email notifications, you’ll like what he’s cooking up.
But lets chat Gravity Forms updates for a moment.
Since the last time we chatted, a minor release of Gravity Forms shipped, version 2.8.5. Aside from a minor security patch, there weren’t any dramatic user facing features rolled out.
Some add-ons in our collection also saw some minor updates, including:
- Zapier 4.3
- Geolocation 1.2
- EmailOctopus 1.3
- HubSpot 2.1
Gravity SMTP has reached Release Candidate 5, including new or adjustments to features like:
- Easier Email Previewing
- Effortless Bulk Deletion
- Email entry search
- And an early introduction to incorporating User Roles, to assign certain levels of access to different features of the product.
As always, head to https://www.gravityforms.com/newsletter/ to stay connected for all of the updates, especially if you’re waiting for the full release of Gravity SMTP!
What would make Gravity Forms better?
If you’ll allow me, I’d love to present you with an important question: “What would make Gravity Forms better?”
Let me repeat that for those of you 2X listeners: “What would make Gravity Forms better?”
Gravity Forms was one of the first commercial WordPress products I ever purchased when I started my agency back in 2007-8. It was one of the most important plugins at the heart of a lot of projects we worked on.
Building out business directories and review sites were a type of site I found myself building a lot of. Even real estate sites — because back then integrating into IDX/MLS was a mess — were using Gravity Forms internally to post their properties on WordPress.
Mapping custom fields to custom post types, dynamically displaying those posts on the front-end, with user registration as icing on the proverbial cake meant Gravity Forms helped us push the value of our work even higher.
But it’s been a while since I’ve been in the trenches of building sites for clients.
We get a ton of feedback from our standard channels, but I’m looking for personal feedback from you, a listener of Breakdown. Email me, matt@gravityforms.com and let me know how you’re using it, and what would make it better for you.
Just because I work at Gravity Forms doesn’t mean I’m no longer an enduser, though.
As you’ve probably heard me talk about before, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Gravity Forms building out donation forms and event registration pages, for the Nick Strong Foundation, a non-profit my best friend started.
I’ve been taking copious notes, to say the least.
I love how flexible our product is, but I’m not oblivious to some of the shortcomings when you really push it — say — into the world of donations.
There’s a lot I’d like to see, too. Specifically for donation forms:
- How far the form is from reaching a particular goal
- Promo info or call outs to users who just donated. Opt-in, of course.
- And pre determined designs for the form themselves
If you have some ideas like this, I’d love to hear from you. Again, reach me at matt@gravityforms.com
Joe Anderson Interview
Coming up next is my interview with Joe Anderson, the creator of Gravity Forms Email Customizer plugin over at https://www.metaphorcreations.com/
It’s a new way to design email notifications utilizing the default WordPress block editor. You can purchase it from his site for $39year.
I hope you enjoy our conversation, and I look forward to talking to you in the next episode.
