Breakdown - A Gravity Forms Podcast

Matt: [00:00:00] Five, four, three, two, one.
Hey, Gravity Formers. It's Thursday, February 29th, 2024. I'm excited to share some updates at Gravity Forms, including two great products coming to the Gravity Forms ecosystem. I'll have those interviews and more coming up. It's Breakdown, a Gravity Forms podcast.
Spring is in the air, at least for me anyway. I've had the chance to interview two indie developers building out their new products in the Gravity Forms ecosystem. I think you'll really enjoy hearing about who they are and what they're offering up. Just a hint to keep you here. If you ever want to search through all of your [00:01:00] form entries at once, Keep listening.
If you use Gravity Forms in part with your marketing or sales efforts, think landing pages and signups, keep listening for a way to track your conversions. But before we get to that part of the show, let's talk about some other happenings in our space from our team here at Gravity Forms. And our certified developers.
First up from the gravity form side, we released an update to our stripe add on now at version 5. 5. The biggest change is a function that was previously removed mapping coupon codes to a subscription field. This should be a welcomed return for those of you selling memberships with gravity forms and stripe.
And next, Gravity SMTP hits RC4, that's Release Candidate 4, inching ever so close to that final release product. Use the link in the show notes to read up on the latest release. There's also a link to a demo you can play with without having to install it yourself. Check out the post for more details.
We've built in support for using Google Workspace as a sending service, making it even easier [00:02:00] to send reliable emails from your WordPress website. And now from our certified developers, it's always fun to see new products that launch from the certified developers. First up cosmic giant, the team launched a new plugin for gravity forms called one time password.
You can check it out on their website or click the link in the show notes. I asked Travis Lopes founder at cosmic giant about his latest product quote, verifying the identity of form submitters. important, something we've already been well in tune with. Thanks to our legal signing product. Similarly, form spam is constantly on the rise.
We saw one time password as the perfect opportunity to tackle both issues and quote, this is a handy plugin that adds a feel to it. input a one time code to validate form submissions. User fills out the form, gets a special code delivered to their inbox, and then the user enters that code, which allows the form to be sent successfully.
It's a handy way to validate human users. Next, we have Gravity Whiz, sparking [00:03:00] more of their magic with a new add on called Code Chest. It's a free plug in that adds a place for users to apply custom code for each of your Gravity Forms. I turn to Dave Smith, founder of Gravity Whiz, for more background on his plugin, quote, We love helping our customers with little tweaks to get their forms working just right.
But the first question we always get is, where do I put this code? CodeChest is our answer. It outputs your custom scripts and styles anywhere your form is displayed and executes them at the right time. And to quote, whether you're using one of their many free snippets or you want a quick and easy way to apply custom JavaScript or CSS to your form, check out the code chest plugin for free.
OK,
now let's get to those interviews that I promised. First up, Derek Aschauer from Conversion Bridge talks to us about tracking conversions with Gravity Forms.[00:04:00]
Hey, Derek, welcome to Breakdown. Thank you so much for having me. I saw your product, new product, and we'll talk about what you've launched in the past. Conversion Bridge. Come up through my, uh, Twitter, a sphere, quite recently, uh, if you're on Twitter or X, it's at ConversionWP. The website is ConversionBridgeWP.
I'll give it, I'll, I'll tell you how I see it, and then you give me the true definition. I see it as a tool that folks who are using Gravity Forms can implement, integrate, implement onto, into Gravity Forms, so they can say, hey, that contact form that came through, or that lead gen form that came through, We want to know where this started from, maybe where it ended up.
And your plugin will help marketers, business owners, non profit, you know, donation folks, see that data that maybe Gravity Forms doesn't give you natively in the [00:05:00] app. Is that a fair assessment and can you go deeper with it?
Derek: Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what the goal is. You know, having done agency type sites for a very long time, that's obviously a very important metric to get is to say, Hey, guess what?
We, you know, we generated this many leads. Great. Where do they come from? So we can push our marketing efforts and focus on things that actually convert better. But one of the main reasons why I'm, I wanted to build conversion bridges. To be honest in the WordPress ecospace, if a plugin does have a conversion tracking thing, it's only for Google Analytics.
With, there's a big push, especially with Google Analytics 4 coming out. How personally I agree that the UI, the experience of Google Analytics 4 is just. Trash. I hate it. I don't like using it. The fact that there's multi day courses on how to just look at your stats and Google analytics tells me that it's overcomplicated for most people, especially like agency customers who have a client who want to just look at their simple stats.
It's just, [00:06:00] it's gotten so overwhelmingly complicated. It's hard. So. I really wanted to move to one of the more alternative analytic platforms like Fathom or Plausible or there's quite a few that I found. Actually, Conversion Bridge right now, as I have it, integrates with 12 different analytic platforms, not just Google Analytics.
So it can be a lot. easier for you and your customers to look at their stats in these, these modern ones are, are just so much nicer. They're back to, to what universal analytics was. It's something you could log in, look at it and your client or whomever's looking at the stats could just instantly understand what's going on.
And so it's, it's just a throwback to the good old days, so to speak of, of being able to see analytics. And so, yeah, so anytime there's a form conversion, all that kind of stuff. Regardless of your analytics platforms. Again, it works with 12 different ones as of right now. I still, there's still even more that I'm working on and it's going to allow marketers and agencies to get their clients to use different platforms that I think are just as [00:07:00] effective as Google analytics.
And of course, a lot of people in the EU and all that kind of stuff with. A heavy privacy focus. Even some countries Google Analytics has been ruled illegal, so they can't really use it. So they need to use an alternative platform. And so this is gonna allow them to add conversion tracking really quick and easily to their forms, or, you know, it also works with all the membership plugins with, you know, WooCommerce.
It's easy to downloads all kinds, you know, my goals, 50 plus plugins, as it says on the website at the moment at about 32, I think as of this morning. So I'm on my way to getting it to work with a lot of them. So it'll be one plugin for all your clients in any analytic platform is the goal. Because another problem that I had was doing agency work was, Hey, I got this client's using restrict content pro and they're using fathom.
Okay. Well, I have to custom code that or buy, you know, one individual add on for this. Well, now over here on this client project, they're using WooCommerce and plausible. [00:08:00] Now we need to custom code that or buy an add on for that one. Well, with current conversion bridge, there'll be one single plugin that you can use for any client that you have, regardless of what plugins are using on their website and regardless of which analytic platform they're
Matt: using.
So personally, I use. I haven't logged into Google Analytics since I ran my agency seven years ago, you know, when I was running my, you know, I run my own personal podcast and my own sort of personal WordPress websites. I switched to Fathom years ago because I just wanted simplicity. And to be quite honest with you, I was never a Google Analytics power user, though in the back of my mind, I've always thought.
Hey, you made the switch to Fathom. You're probably missing something like you're probably missing some power feature or something else I mean based on what you've done in your research developing this product because I think that's on a lot [00:09:00] of folks mind Hey, I'd love to jump to one of these sort of privacy focused analytics tools or even simplified analytics tools, but What?
I'm missing something. I might, I could be missing something for Google Analytics. So we just stay with it. Or maybe most folks say, you know what? Just leave that JavaScript on my website and I'll just keep it there because I'm afraid I might just lose something. Is that the case? I mean, obviously massive like high end features, but is there something like, yeah, you know, when you do make the shift, you're certainly losing this and this.
When you shift from a Google Analytics to, let's say, a Fathom or another sort of privacy focused analytics
Derek: tool. I would say 90 95 percent of people are not missing anything by switching to something like Fathom or one of the other, you know, alternative options that are out there now. Most of us aren't those extreme power users.
You know, like I said, it, it, It requires a course at this point to learn how to use Google Analytics. So we don't use it. And that's, that's the thing. Like, great. You can keep using Google [00:10:00] Analytics, but if you're not actually using it because it's so overwhelming, then you might as well not use it. So going to Fathom or Plausible again, you know, lots of different options that are out there.
There's another great one that I found called Perch Analytics. It's a wonderful one. I think is great. It has great tools. That you could learn and pick up in 15, 20 minutes to figure out how to do, you know, save a couple searches of certain stats that you want to see. And you can do a little bit of deep dives in there.
But after you set that up in 15, 20 minutes, you're good. And you just, you know, go to your bookmark. That's I want to see my save stuff when these conversions happen, where they came from. And you're set. And it's really, really simple. The costs are relatively cheap. as well for most for most people. So I know that's that's also a big thing.
We've been used to free analytics from Google Analytics for a long time. But again, you that you know, your data was the product for them, not you and all that kind of stuff. So that's that was, you know, what you were giving them in exchange for free. So now we can, you know, [00:11:00] 510 bucks a month for a lot of people, because, you know, Most WordPress websites are not getting over 100, 000 page views a month.
Most of them are getting less than that. So, I mean, if you're working at a, you know, 500 person company with a 10 person dedicated marketing team and a million dollar a year budget, yeah, maybe Google analytics is going to be a better option because your team's more familiar with it. It does have some power tools that maybe integrate with third party tools that you're also using.
I get it. That makes sense. But I would say for most people, it's overkill at this point because it's become an enterprise level software, not an everyday user software, Google Analytics says. So, one of
Matt: the things, and I'll fully admit this, on my Fathom account, I think they call it goals that you can set up.
I don't do that, you know, it's like in the back of my mind, again, another one of these things as a sort of busy content creator, it's like, yeah, I wish I could do everything. I [00:12:00] wish I could create the content, have the analytics, do the email and just have this well rounded report at the end, set up my goals and do all that stuff.
Does your plugin help motivate me or give me a sort of way to start thinking, okay, here's why you should set up. these conversion, this conversion tracking funnel, if you will, or do you help with encouraging or getting people to think about here's the goal you should be tracking. Here's what you should be looking at as a successful.
R. O. I. The dreaded three letter acronym in in marketing. Do you help us think about that? Or is that still largely up to the use case of of the user?
Derek: I mean, obviously, that would be some education on the website of telling people, you know what you need to do and why. I mean, the whole point of conversion bridge is to make it simple.
It's you'll install conversion bridge. Hey, look, there's an integration with Lifter L. M. S. Toggle Done. That's all you have to do. So, it's not like it's going to take a lot of setup to do it. So, if it's one toggle to [00:13:00] do it, why not track with those conversions and see where those people are coming from? So, Gravity Forms, you know, one click, it's enabled.
That's all you have to do. It's an option for every form. You can just check a box. I want to add conversion tracking for this form. So, I'm done. And then you go in your Fathom Analytics every month that you check and say, Hey, look, there's been 57 form submissions. Click on that thing in Fathom. Great. Now, once I click on that.
Where did these come from? Okay, great. These came a lot of, I noticed a lot of people came from this one random forum that I've never heard of. I should reach out to them, maybe do a partnership or, you know, I don't know. It's a great way to discover where people are coming from, you know, where you're, where you're getting stuff from, especially with, with forms and stuff like that, you know, if you don't have an e commerce site, you know, where you're getting the most sales, you could, you know, there, there's certain, certain analytic platforms are better than other fathom is.
Good in some regards. It does have some e commerce tracking where you can say like dollar value. So you can see something down to like this lead [00:14:00] got me 50 sales, but I made a hundred dollars cause I only sold my 2 widgets. This site got me 10 sales, but it made me 5, 000 cause they bought all my, you know, really expensive items, things like that, you get a good feel for where you're making the most money, not just number of sales as well.
So, you know, conversion tracking can be really helpful. It's, it doesn't have to be hard. I think that is. The one thing that I'm hoping to solve with conversion bridge is that there's just a lot of people who are like, I just don't know how to do it. Uh, and there's a lot of WordPress plugins that don't have a conversion tracking add on for it.
So they don't, and they just kind of go, well, we'll just kind of guess and hope that there's, they're looking at stuff, but, but hopefully by simplifying it, all people can be a lot more educated about. About their own business and what they can do to improve it. And then over time, you don't have to work on providing some kind of what to, what's the next step once you've learned where things are coming from and what to do with that and stuff like that.
What's your
Matt: preferred alternative to Google analytics?
Derek: Right now, my [00:15:00] two favorites are, again, I've analyzed about 12 or 13 and so far Persh Analytics and UserMaven are my two favorite ones right now. A good combination of a modern UI for them, so they're really easy to see, everything's right there in front of you, and not a very complicated UX to get some even more detailed.
Stuff are detailed data about where things are coming from, you know, top purchased items, things like that. You can do a little bit, you can get a little bit more advanced with, with those two platforms, but again, even myself, I'm still early. I haven't used these, you know, left it on my site for a year and really analyzed, you know, historical data because I've, I, you know, I had this idea back in August.
Right before WordCamp US is when I came up with this idea, and then, and then right before Christmas, I finally started building it. So I'm only about a month in of developing it, so I don't even have, you know, I can't say I'm a professional in 12 different analytics platforms in, you know, in a few months.
It's like you, you know, I've used Google Analytics forever, because that's just what it [00:16:00] was, and that's the only. add on that existed for things like easy digital downloads that I use heavily for selling my plugins and stuff like that. So I'm still on my journey as well a bit. But so far, those are, those are my favorite ones.
Matt: What was the aha moment for creating this product? You have another product, which is in the photography e commerce space. You enable photographers to sell. I'll just say that you sell prints or photos and stuff like that, sort of an alternative to WooCommerce. Was it through that work? Like I'm selling plugins through, I'm selling my plugin.
I don't know where this is converting from. Was it that or was it something else?
Derek: Uh, it was the frustration of using Google analytics was the number one thing. And then also half of my customers for my sunshine photo cart plugin are European customers. So I hear from them a lot about, you know, privacy things here in the U S honestly, it's not as much, not as much as a concern, but because of those customers, they tell me a lot about that.
Give me some feedback about privacy things. So I've become a little bit more conscious and aware of [00:17:00] privacy concerns with. Your website, having to do cookie banners and things like that. And I was always like, I don't want to put a cookie banner. Those things are horrible. And there's a lot of analytic platform, alternative analytic platforms that you can set up that don't require a cookie banner.
There are some configurations you can do apparently with Google analytics, but it's just so dicey, especially for those in the EU, there's a lot of them in the EU that just don't want to use Google analytics. Because of they're just kind of wary of whether or not it crosses the line of the legal, you know, legalities in their country.
So it just, I just saw an opening for something that could do it. And also I have another plugin, confetti plugin, which does a fun little confetti explosion when you do a conversion. So you fill out a form works for gravity forms as well and WooCommerce and other things. So it's a fun little thing that pops up and it's, you know, kind of a fun little deal, but it also was, well, guess what?
A conversion tracking is you have to do a conversion tracking at the same time you would do a confetti explosion on a lot of different plugins. So I was like, well, I've already done a lot of this work, [00:18:00] so I felt like I was halfway there of understanding the needs of how to the technical side of how to go, you know, track conversions because it's the same thing, a line of JavaScript that gets output on a conversion.
I've learned it is a bit different because nothing works exactly how you think when you start development. But, but yeah, that's kind of where all these kind of pieces came together for me to, to work on this new product. Talk to me about
Matt: the media tracking component. Is this something that is reported separately from?
Let's say form conversion, a lot of folks using Gravity Forms, myself included, might be using it as a creator site, like myself, you have a membership, you have a donation page, and that's all powered by Gravity Forms, but of course I have videos, and I have other stuff, other media that plays on the site, is that something that reports separately, and one can see, oh, here's how many people are actually watching my videos that are embedded in these blog posts here, and then I can go look at my analytics on YouTube and say, okay, here's the analytics there, and I can kind of cross, or triangulate, YouTube and say, okay, Where, you know, where [00:19:00] my visitors are watching most.
Yeah, again,
Derek: it'll depend on what analytic platform you have, because this is putting it into your analytics. Okay. So it's wrapping its own separate admin it's yeah. So there's no separate admin tool or area where this is all keeping track of. So you would go into fathom, you could see the goal, you know, the events.
That they're like in fathom and it'll say, you know, video player, play video, whatever you want title, certain analytic platforms. That's where there are some advantages where we can track how long a video has been played and things like that. So you can see, has it, you know, did they do 10 seconds, 50 seconds, things like that, so you can get some extra metadata on each.
each of those views if you, if you have one of those more advanced ones. Fathom is a little bit on the lighter side for advanced details, but you can get, you know, video play. Yeah, this video was played, you know, 20 times in the last month on my website, for sure. And if it works, you know, YouTube. Vimeo native, you know, just mp4s on your [00:20:00] site, stuff like that, and mp3s for audio
Matt: and stuff like that.
Derek Aschauer, ConversionBridgeWP. com. That's ConversionBridgeWP. com. Thanks for hanging out today, Derek. Thanks so much, Matt.
Next, I want to introduce you to Jonathan Williams. He built Gravity Form's Global Search, a great way to search through all of your form entries on one screen. And get this Just a few hours, he went from idea to landing page, to social promotion, to building the product. And he wants your feedback on how to improve it.
Let's have a listen.
Hey, Jonathan, welcome to breakdown. Thanks for having me. This is great. You have launched or created a product in record time. We're going to get into that in a moment. It's for gravity forms, but I want to just like. quickly chat about your background. You have a website called odd jar dot com. You can go to odd jar dot com to find out more about the stuff you do with [00:21:00] WordPress and gravity forms.
Yes, sir. Take us down the path. What do you, what do you do with WordPress and gravity forms? I've done all sorts
Jonathan: of things, you know, for the longest time I was, uh, that most, uh, abused and legendary creature in the web space. I was a generalist. And so, uh, WordPress is great if you want to be a generalist, of course, because you can get into pretty much every aspect of like the web and building websites, you know, as we all know, you can start with no code and then you can very quickly get your hands real dirty in there if you want to.
So long story short, I actually started way back when as a, uh, a newspaper journalist. This was, like, back in 2000 or so. I started there, and I quickly got promoted to online editor because I think I was the only person in the newsroom who cared about the internet or had any interest in it. Do you know
Matt: the internet?
Or wanted to? Yes, I do. You're promoted. Like,
Jonathan: that is almost exactly what happened. I, I, I, it was very similar to, like, the managing editor walking into the room and being like, is anybody in here wanna, you know, mess with this website they say we have [00:22:00] to have? It was something like that. Anyway. But when I saw what was about to happen there, even though I did love journalism, you know, I got into more and more like website management and then was very quickly, uh, in a role where I needed to, to rebuild like the, the
Matt: paper's primary website.
And so
Jonathan: I did that and eventually got around to, to letting them, uh, let me use WordPress for some projects. And from then on, you know, it was just off to the races and I quickly, quickly started doing, um, much more WordPress work and got out of the newspaper industry. And then once I got into WordPress, um, you know, I'd been coding since I was a kid because my dad got me a Commodore 64.
When I was like nine or 10, you know, how those old machines worked. I mean, you kids today probably don't know how those work, but you know, back in the day, if, if you didn't learn some basic, you couldn't do anything with that computer. So that's, that's sort of my background on how it got started. Yeah. And then once I got into WordPress, um, I very quickly got into wanting to make it do more things than beyond sort of what you might call [00:23:00] a simple publication.
Site, right? And so then you start learning about those actions and filters. And then I found gravity forms. And then you've basically got like a software as a service in a box, you know, drop gravity forms onto wordpress. And there's, there's very little, you know, that you can't, that you can't build with it.
I'm not saying you should necessarily build everything you could build in it with that particular setup, but yeah. You can definitely get going when you
Matt: look back to when you were learning how to just air quotes do computers on that Commodore 64. And then from there, sort of analogous with WordPress, right?
Because WordPress, let's say, I don't know, 3. 0 and above, even if you jumped into WordPress, when it sort of graduated to that three dot x level, even back then, like you were still Learning how to do WordPress, like, okay, uh, what's this custom post type thing? What's this custom fields thing? And then you would go to the internet, you would kind of learn and read a tutorial and kind of like figure out how to, you had to know HTML and CSS.
Things are now, have dramatically changed with, [00:24:00] of course, the introduction of, of course, JavaScript, Gutenberg being rolled into the block editor, full site editing, my god, there's so many page builders these days, and just look what you can do with Gravity Forms. While people still are out there learning how to do this stuff today with today's WordPress, a short 10 years ago, it was vastly different.
It
Jonathan: really was. I mean, if you, if you weren't comfortable Drop it in some PHP, you know, there was a, there was a real limit on the customizations you could do. It's interesting the space that we're in now, you know, like all the guys who started way back when I have mixed feelings about, about, but some of the newer stuff that's mostly just, you know, me like getting my, my feelings used to it.
But I have mixed feelings about it just because, you know, now you can, you don't need to know code. You don't have to jump into PHP the way that you used to, to really start customizing. Right. And really start and really start building. But then I think at the same time, you know, with the introduction of chat, GPT, it's never been [00:25:00] easier for non coders to go ahead and jump in and actually write little custom scripts, right?
Right. Actually, you know, come up with custom functions, come up with, with whatever you
Matt: need. Do you have like a, a really interesting. thing you've solved with Gravity Forms that, that you can share? Is there something top of mind or is there a, if not something that's like really, really special, but is there a common thing you like to solve with Gravity Forms, either of the two?
So for my own use,
Jonathan: uh, my favorite thing is building, uh, basically many web apps with it, like little SAS applications, right? Just because again, it's, you know, I've used Laravel, uh, to build things and I've used like, what's another PHP framework if folks aren't familiar, um, and then like CakePHP, just, you know, Symfony, all sorts of like PHP frameworks that I've used to build things.
And I've tried a lot of the other, you know, non WordPress form builders and. Uh, this isn't just blowing smoke, but I don't think there's a better form system in any platform. Like, I've never seen a form system where it's, [00:26:00] it's easier or faster to just immediately set up fields with all the validation that you want.
And, you know, thanks to the add on system with, like, Gravity Wiz and, um, Gravity Perks and Gravity View, um, Gravity PDF, I'm, I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Um, but, you know, once you add those on there It's, it's rare that you're going to, well, it's, it's, it's rare that, that you need too, too much custom code, right.
To get that, to get like just that basic form set up and that's still such a pain sometimes in, in other, in other frameworks. And then when you, when you combine like all the, the custom processing you can do on the backend with like, you know, the actions and the filters, you know, once that data is submitted.
You can just do anything with it. You can send it anywhere. You can, you can do anything with it. So, so I found that to be incredibly flexible, incredibly fast, particularly like when I want to prototype a new idea, uh, there's been a couple of cases where I started with gravity forms because I had an idea and then I did a prototype.
And then I realized for some reason, [00:27:00] actually, you know what, I think I do need like custom, my SQL databases and all kinds of. Things. And so you might pick another framework, but a lot of the time, like gravity forms is fine for simple applications. And again, if you, if you want to get really nerdy, you can, you can turn it into like a little relational database system.
And then you've got. Uh, can't have the best of both worlds, which just helps
Matt: everybody. You have a product that you just worked on and launched seemingly overnight. It's called Gravity Forms Global Search. The first line on the landing page is, you love Gravity Forms, I love Gravity Forms, we all love Gravity Forms.
Take us down the path. What, uh, what Gravity Forms Global Search is, what it does, and, um, how you got to building this new product.
Jonathan: So, uh, as the name implies, uh, it's just a global search plugin. That makes it possible to search everything in your gravity, gravity forms, database, all entries, all forms, all notes, all fields from one search field.
So gravity forms by default has a [00:28:00] great and very granular, um, search built into it. You know, you can, you can search just for entries where, you know, field 12 equals. A particular email address or a particular number, which is great when you, you really want to drill down. Um, I ran into a situation though with some larger Gravity Forms builds where we would have multiple connected forms in a system that was this one that I'm thinking of specifically what was taking job applications and, um, you know, you'd have multiple connected forms and you might have 5, 000 applications come in in a year, each with like maybe three or four supporting entries and other forms.
And so obviously in that situation, you know, if you have to, if you just want to see all the information attached to a particular email address in your gravity forms database, you know, you might have to search all four or five forms individually through all those thousands of entries. And so my plugin, you've got one box.
And it
Matt: searches everything. Was this born from, um, like a client project? [00:29:00] And a client pain point that you kept seeing? It was. It was. It was.
Jonathan: Exactly. It was for both Vim and me, occasionally. We would need to track something down if a particular application had gone missing or become lost. And yeah, just the ability to quickly, especially when you're debugging, like how forms are connected, if you've done anything fairly complicated, you know, just to be able to have, you know, developers are incredibly impatient.
I know that I am just to be able to have one box and then just to see a list of here. Here's everything notes, entries, fields,
Matt: forms. So I was joking about overnight, but you did build it pretty quickly, right? You sort of did a hashtag build in public kind of launch where you were like, I saw you actively tweeting about it and saying you were like building out a landing page, building out the product and you were trying to get it done in a certain timeframe.
What was the, what was the, um, the strategy behind that? Yeah. So
Jonathan: initially I did, I gave myself, Because I am a world class procrastinator, I know there are going to be people listening to this and they're going to think, no, Jonathan, [00:30:00] I'm, uh, I'm the number one procrastinator. I'm sorry. You're no, I'm better.
I think you are.
Matt: I was thinking it was me.
Jonathan: No, we, we, we took a poll. It's me. I've got the gold. Um,
Matt: so I gave myself
Jonathan: because I had to, I gave myself, uh, just, um, a weekend Basically two days to build it, to build the plugin. Now I cheated a little bit on that because I had built a previous version that I released for free that was just incredibly basic and, uh, pretty slow.
And so I had, I'd been thinking about it in my head for a while, um, how to improve on that and make it better. And so I gave myself two days to, to code it. And then Yeah, late one night on Twitter as I was finishing that gave my gave myself one hour to launch it and just described as much as I could that launch process.
I didn't make the hour and then that launch process, you know, was because I hadn't done anything other than coding it. So it was like, build the landing page, build the, um, the gravity form like to put it up for sale, you know, connected to stripe. Yeah. And it's also [00:31:00] worth mentioning that I, you know, it's not just a plugin for Gravity Forms, but I'm using Gravity Forms to sell it on my site, right?
It's, it's the Gravity Forms, just one purchase form tied to Stripe on the landing page, you know, at the bottom. So I gave myself basically an hour to do all that and then also relaunch. I, because again, I'm a procrastinator, I decided in the middle of that two days, I should probably go ahead and update most of my website at the same time.
So I was trying to launch that and get the Gravity Forms page up, like write the copy. Um, have, um, Dolly generate, uh, some sort of a cover art image for it and yeah, it didn't quite make the hour. It took about two all things considered, but we got it done and you know, I did it sort of publicly on Twitter and I think I got to say that is a great and easy way to find followers who are interested in what you're doing.
It's a great and easy way to make, you know, context with other developers. I feel strange saying this in light of how often there's like WordPress drama, but you know, there, there is a great. And helpful [00:32:00] community of WordPress people on Twitter on X. I'm sorry, I keep calling it Twitter. They've changed the name.
There really is. There are some not so great folks that you sometimes have to mute. But for me overall, like it's been incredibly supportive and just just in terms of like doing that building a public. And I've done that a few times with other projects. You know, let's set a deadline. Let's see if we can do it.
Have a little fun. Maybe for me, that's been the most successful way to, to meet other developers, like have conversations with other developers and possible clients. And I just mentioned that because I struggled for a long time and still struggle with like the idea of marketing and selling, which I'm, I better get over in a hurry now, but I'm trying to sell plugins.
Um, it just doesn't, I just don't, I know people who have like a gift for it and they're genuine about it. And, um, they can do it without feeling icky, but almost all that standard marketing feels icky to me for reasons I don't know. So just, you know, like building in public and just sharing the experience and being honest, like, about the little mistakes you make along the way or challenges you run into.
I think, um, for me, it's been [00:33:00] a great way to have. Uh, really positive experiences
Matt: on social media. Again, just to run down the list of things on the Gravity Forms Global Search. Searches all entries, forms, fields, and notes. Handles thousands of entries. Automatically updates the search database when entries are added, updated, and deleted in Gravity Forms.
Displays links to matching entries. Displays a form name, date created, username, entry ID. Creates custom search table, finishes searches in seconds for fast performance, because that's what I think a lot of people who might be looking at this saying, Hey, look, I work for a higher ed and we have this registration form that's been there for 10 years with hundreds of thousands of custom of, of students who have registered.
We need this to be fast. And you're focusing on that. What's the next, I know it's super early, but like, what's the thing you're looking forward to in the future to enhance or develop next for this product? It's a good question,
Jonathan: and I'm, I'm hoping the community will answer some of that for me, like, as people use the plugin and, um, and it's had a few sales, which isn't bad for something that, [00:34:00] you know, launched on Twitter.
Right? But word's getting around and people have been sharing it. And I think somebody mentioned it in a newsletter the other day, which is, which is great to see. So I'm hoping people will see it and use it and then suggest. I mean, it's always, I think a lot of developers, like we start, I think a lot of our, I certainly did, but used to look at my code.
Like I was the great American novelist or like, or my conception of my projects, you know, like I'm some creative genius. I was much younger then, but what I've, what I've learned, uh, Bruce to my ego or not is that, you know, the customers know what the product needs to do. The customers know what the product needs to do.
And as a developer. They don't, I'm not saying that you take every suggestion. I know that some suggestions can't be implemented or silly, but you know, when you, for me, it's when you hear the same thing from four or five different people, you know, that's when you know that that that's something you need to consider.
So I'm hoping people will jump in. I have some other ideas. Um, like as I'm using it, I'm On some of the other very large, like, Gravity Forms things that I've [00:35:00] built and testing it. I'd like, I'd like to have a differentiation in the search results and let you know where the match came from. Right now it searches everything, and it gives you the link to jump to the entry.
But right now it doesn't necessarily say, we found this in field 12, or we found this in the notes. And I think a list of, like, the sources that were matched within the entry, in addition to a link to the entry, would be nice, just for quickly scanning. So a handful of improvements like that. And then I'm.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how, how the, the speed behaves, because that was my main focus, really, in building this on, um, on all the various hosts out there. I mean, anybody who's done, like, WordPress. Plugin testing knows that the, you know, that's the hard part is, is testing it against, uh, as many hosts as possible to find whatever strange little server bugaboos or strange configurations you might not have anticipated.
So
Matt: far, none of those. Knock on wood. Yeah, that's great. Jonathan Williams, oddjar. com, Gravity Forms [00:36:00] Global Search at John of House John on Twitter X. Thanks for hanging out today.
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