Wow. For people that claim they love Gravity Forms and what we do so much you guys sure are a negative bunch. Out of curiosity, do you guys even follow release announcements via the Gravity Forms blog or our Twitter stream?
Let's see what has gone on this month...
Yesterday we made the Gravity Forms Authorize.Net Add-On available as a public beta release after an extensive private by request testing period. It is available in the Add-On manager.
Today we made the Gravity Forms Signature Add-On available as a public beta release after an extensive private invite only testing period. It is available in the Add-On manager.
Next week we will be releasing Gravity Forms v1.6.3 via automatic update. Don't let the version number fool you, there are some powerful new features in this release. Major enhancements to conditional logic and the Post Category field that open the door to all kinds of cool implementations. We easily could have called it v1.7 but that isn't how we are versioning things.
This month also saw feature updates to the User Registration Add-On, PayPal Add-On and FreshBooks Add-Ons. Just before that there was a major update to the AWeber Add-On that implemented an entirely new API and a major update to MailChimp that introduced MailChimp Group support.
The Gravity Forms PayPal Pro Add-On is in development and nearing beta status. An Add-On for Stripe is planned to begin development after that.
But apparently things are dry around here. You pissed your $200 away. Oh wait, renewals are 50% off so it's actually $99.50 per year after the first year. Minor technicality.
Now that the Authorize.Net Add-On is good to go we have a framework to now create add-ons for other payment gateways. The PayPal Add-On was not a good framework to use because it doesn't work the same way as most payment gateways.
The comparisons to WooCommerce and it's many payment gateways shows a complete lack of understanding of the difference between the two products and how payment gateways come into play from an integration standpoint
You want to know why it's so easy for WooCommerce to create payment gateways so quickly? Because it's a much simpler integration. With WooCommerce the checkout process is predefined, it doesn't vary, it doesn't change. Integration in that situation is very easy. It's a situation where you can just drop in a new API.
There is a LOT more complexity involved in integrating custom forms created with Gravity Forms with payment gateways and allowing extensive configuration and integration with other Add-Ons so everything works together in a cohesive manner. There are a lot more options and configuration settings for users to customize how things work with their form and the gateway to suit their needs. Not to mention properly handle recurring payment situations, which WooCommerce does not do.
Our team works extremely hard. We don't view adding new features as some sort of feature war where we have to rush out new features before somebody else does. We don't rush features. We put a lot of thought and planning into how we implement new features and Add-Ons. We treat Gravity Forms like a world class product.
We recently hired a new employee who will be managing support, which will free up one of our developers from having to contribute as much to support. It will give us additional bandwidth. Unfortunately he won't be able to begin until April 1, but that's the price you pay for hiring the right people.
I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. No need to sugar coat it. Unless it wasn't extremely obvious, which I know it was, some of the comments in this thread royally pissed me off knowing how hard we bust our ass on this product.
All this and I didn't even mention that we are also in the process of developing an entirely new product (Gravity Charge) which will also have extensive Gravity Forms integration.
Posted 12 years ago on Saturday February 18, 2012 |
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