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Can Gravity Forms work for my idea?

Gravity Support Forums » General » Pre-Purchase Questions

  1. agklein
    Member

    I'm looking to conduct a contest on a standalone Wordpress site and would like to see if Gravity Forms can help me facilitate it as I'd like.

    Here's a basic description of the contest and website that I have in mind (and some of the functionality I imagine I'd required from the site):

    Contest: Visitors guess what the price of a stock will be on a future date. Person who has the closest guess wins a cash prize.

    Website: Form for contest submission is prominent at top of the homepage. It will include about five custom fields, including the entrant's guess and text field for them to briefly explain rationale for guess. After entry is submitted, data is fed into a database, the entrant is redirected to a confirmation page and a new page on the site is automatically created with entry info. The new pages are listed in reverse chronological order on the homepage (ie, most recent entry at top). So from a functionality perspective, the site is basically a user-generated blog, with the form providing all the inputs.

    A few other logistical requirements: Each person only gets one submission – ideally we'd like to require visitors to log in via Twitter (using OAuth?) to ensure this. However we'd also like the capability to manually provide a second submission to some people. Also, a validation requirement of the form would be that no one can guess a price that has already been submitted.

    Can Gravity Forms provide all the necessary functionality to make this idea work?

    Posted 12 years ago on Monday October 31, 2011 | Permalink

  2. Carl Hancock
    Administrator

    Gravity Forms could be used for this, but not necessarily exactly as you described and with all the options you described. It can certainly be used to capture the information.

    If you want to limit the submissions to one per person you need a way to determine who a unique individual is. The quickest/easiest way to do this is to limit it to one entry per email address. You do this by adding an Email field to your form, then editing it and setting it Rules to No Duplicates. This means that it won't allow a duplicate email to be submitted.

    I'm not sure how you could provide a second submission to some people if you set the Email field to not allow duplicates. That could be problematic given how things work.

    Gravity Forms does not currently integrate with Twitter for oAuth. It's something we'd love to add in the future, along with Facebook integration.

    Out of the box Gravity Forms is only going to show you the entry data in the admin. It does not display entry data on the front end of your site unless you use Gravity Forms to create WordPress Posts, which wouldn't be the case here.

    The good news is it can still be done. You can either write custom code to query and display entry data wherever/however you want... OR you can use a 3rd party add-on that allows you to easily display entry data on the front end of your site. You can find it here:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gravity-forms-addons/

    Gravity Forms is very powerful. Sometimes it's just a matter of learning the feature set and then being creative with how you use the available tools. It is also very powerful and customizable from a code customization standpoint. It can do just about anything you want it to.

    Posted 12 years ago on Monday October 31, 2011 | Permalink