Gravity Forms is form building plugin that simplifies the task of building attractive interactive forms for your WordPress websites. Sure, if you’re just looking for some basic contact form functionality, then there are several great contact form plugins out there for $0. But, if you’re looking for a contact form plugin that has extra features, such as:

• Submissions stored and viewable on WordPress Backend
• Multi-page forms
• Post Field
• Advanced fields for Name, Email, Address, etc.
• Drag-and-Drop form creation
• Create dynamic notifications using merge tags
• Ability to add custom logic through hooks
• Conditional logic to hide or show fields
• and MUCH MORE!

I can imagine and have seen or personally used Gravity forms to create:

• A quiz that would send a custom notification to the user based on the answers that were given.
• A multi-page application form that lets the user know how far they are in to the application process.
• A small e-commerce store that sells products, collects payment, and then delivers product

Now that you’re acquainted with some of the features of Gravity Forms, let me run you through the backend so you can see for yourself how easy and intuitive it is to create your own custom forms. This plugin really is a time-saving beast!

Gravity Forms form builder

Above is a picture of the form builder within gravity forms. This is one of gravity forms biggest selling points, and why I recommend it so highly in this review. If you manage multiple websites or multiple forms on one website, then this is going to be a killer time-saving feature. You can simply click each box, the box will slide down with some extra options, and then you can choose between these options which include things such as custom logic, required field, or values.

Gravity Forms Notifications

Above is a screenshot of the gravity forms notifications builder. The notification builder allows you to create custom emails that are sent to either the website admin (or other appropriate persons) or the person who submitted the form. By customizing a submission notification we were able to create a quiz with a dynamic email that depended on what the user submitted in his questionnaire. Try doing that with a free plugin…

On top of some of these obvious features, gravity forms also allows you to advanced logic through accessing hooks and filters. An example of this would be to access the pre_submission hook in order to compute some response based on the user’s input. Another example would be writing some custom code to interface gravity forms with a 3rd-party service. This really expands gravity form’s functionality by essentially allowing you the ability to manipulate the submitted data however you need.

Bottom Line

It took a while for me to bite the bullet and drop the $199 for a developer’s license of Gravity Forms. But looking back, I am glad that I did. In the past few months alone I have used Gravity Forms on several websites, and have saved tons of time over having to write custom code from scratch. If you run any serious WordPress website, I highly recommend you get Gravity Forms.

Inserting Google Maps into a website is CRAZY easy! Usually what I would advise someone to do is to:

1. Go to Google Maps
2. Search for the address that you want to show on your map
3. Grab the embed code
4. Insert embed code in your website

Could it get any easier? Well, that really depends on what your development needs are. I recently completed a project for a client that owned a mobile BBQ restaurant. This client wanted a map on his website that he could easily update with the location of his mobile smoking pit. I didn’t think it made much sense to make the client do the 4 steps above just to update his map… So I decided to look into Geocoding a google map. This way, all my client had to do to update his map was to login and change the address.

For those that do not know, geocoding is essentially the process of taking an address and turning that into latitude and longitude coordinates. Google maps has geocoding baked in – FOR FREE!

Without further ado, below is some code on using geocoding with Google Maps.

This code goes in the head.

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false" type="text/javascript"></script>

This code can go anywhere in the body.

<div id="map" style="width: 413px; height: 300px;"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">

   var mapOptions = {
       zoom: 16,
      center: new google.maps.LatLng(54.00, -3.00),
      mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
   };

   var geocoder = new google.maps.Geocoder();

   var address = '3410 Taft Blvd  Wichita Falls, TX 76308';

  geocoder.geocode( { 'address': address}, function(results, status) {
      if (status == google.maps.GeocoderStatus.OK) {
        map.setCenter(results[0].geometry.location);
        var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
            map: map,
            position: results[0].geometry.location
        });
      } else {
        alert("Geocode was not successful for the following reason: " + status);
      }
    });

var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map"), mapOptions);
   </script>

You can update the size of the map by changing the width and height values of the #map div. To change the starting zoom level, change zoom. You can change the type of map by changing mapTypeId. And most importantly, you can change the address by changing the value in var address.

You should be able to plug this code in to your website and be good to go. This code will take the address in var address, Geocode it using Google, and then center the map with a marker at the address specified.

This is a fairly simple example of Geocoding, but you could take this code and make a map that will dynamically update with user input. In a future post, I will discuss how to integrate Geocoding into WordPress so that you can easily create and edit maps without having to get latitude and longitude coordinates.