Having been on a wild goose chase for the past year or so with a proprietary PHP solution, and recently Classipress by AppThemes, I'm now back in the world of Gravity Forms. And it feels good.
During my time away I am encouraged to see tons of progress by Carl and his team, particularly the Paypal Add-on.
I've spent most of the day (yes, really) just reading through the forum and searching for posts relating to some of the issues I am seeking answers to.
I currently run a vacation rental listing site manually using WordPress and I've been exploring several solutions to automate the site, meaning allowing accommodation providers to create their own listings, pay for them, edit them etc.
Making the front-end look great is the least of my worries. It's the back-end, the area where my members will be creating and managing their profiles and listings that is the real challenge.
The ClassiPress theme offers a solution to my problems, and although it has some of the functionality I need, I'm not keen on heavily customising a theme that I feel has serious flaws in its structure, for example they use custom fields to store geographical data. So in effect, you could choose Austria as your country and Iowa as your state! Brilliant! ;-)
And AppThemes, I feel, are spreading themselves too thin and that is about to get worse when they unleash the behemoth known as Vantage, which has the potential/danger of bringing them to their knees!
So, I have turned my attention back to Gravity Forms as I need to start at the beginning, which is collecting the relevant information I need from my members in order to create listings to display on the front-end.
With the exception of front-end editing a good chunk of this can be solved with GF alone, but I need to fill in the blanks and make a decision on how I move forward with my plan.
I've read on this forum that version 1.7 will see the first foray into front-end editing, something I definitely need for my site.
I have also read in various posts about Gravity Charge, and though I'm not sure exactly what this will be, I am hopeful that it will solve another problem: creating membership packages with durations, i.e. list for 12 months.
Armed with GF 1.7 and front-end editing, plus Gravity Charge, I am wondering if these will be the essential tools and building blocks in creating a paid-for listing site with membership packages?
Where members can pay to list, then create and manage their listings, renew their listings once they expire, just like they can with Classipress except on my terms on how my site is structured?
If so then this squares the circle for me and makes anything possible. Throw a bookings Add-on into the mix and the circle will be perfectly round.
