Your Plugin and Your Marketing are not in Sync - someone needs to define "easy"

Gravity Support Forums » General » Feature Requests

sharonq
Member

I have been working with forms for years - HTML forms, Joomla forms and WP forms.

This is the first time I have purchased a WP form and after reading the website and knowing that Freshbooks and Mailchimp integrate Gravity Forms seems a no brainer.

I am not a complete novice at WP or CSS but not an expert either.

As far as I can tell the only people who find working with Gravity Forms "easy" are CSS experts. So many of the answers on this forum are "this is easy all you have to do is go into CSS and...." - if the answer requires CSS it is not EASY.

I was expecting a simple drag and drop interface or at least some way of simply putting one field beside another. Other forms have a simple checkbox that says "beside" or "under" and the field2 automatically places itself beside/beneath field one.

Other forms have simple fill in boxes for formatting - background, border, font, etc.

Where are these features with Gravity forms?

As I search through your forum I find post after post promising a better user interface - but those posts are often a year old or more.

You need to either stop marketing this as "easy" or begin fulfilling that promise.

Is there a simple form editor in the works? When do you expect it's release?

Posted 11 years ago on Tuesday October 9, 2012 | Permalink
Rob Harrell
Member

You can use our ready classes to position inputs side by side and arrange them as you see fit:
http://www.gravityhelp.com/documentation/page/CSS_Ready_Classes

They are easy to use, and you just have to place the appropriate class on the field(s) in question in the form editor.

We consciously decided to let Gravity Forms inherit styling from the theme, which I assume you might have ready in other topics you pulled up. If your theme is nicely styling form elements to match the look and feel of your site, then you should be good to go naturally. However, sometimes, those things get overlooked by a theme designer, so your form can look "basic/plain".

We've been hard at work on new updates and releases to the core and our add-ons, by introducing calculations, conditional shortcodes and now we are working on better notification and confirmation options that will prove to be very helpful. This has yet to make it onto the list of pressing things to do, ahead of the other updates I mentioned. I'm not sure if this is something you want to hear or not, but I'd be glad to help you out in styling forms if you'd like. That is part of our support commitment and is probably your best option to take if you still would like to continue using Gravity Forms.

Posted 11 years ago on Tuesday October 9, 2012 | Permalink
Kevin Flahaut
Administrator

Gravity Forms are completely "easy" out of the box. They are formatted nicely and inherit design/styling cues from your theme by design. Now, yes, "easy" is a subjective term. If you want advanced styling and formatting and know a moderate amount of CSS, then yes, that's easy too. If you don't, then it's easy enough to ask for help here on our forums where our moderators and admins such as Rob are completely happy to help.

Now, just so you realize, we're not in any kind of "feature war" with other plugins. If you expect to find every feature here that you've seen somewhere else, well, that's simply not going to happen. We have purposely decided to avoid the pitfalls many others have fallen into by trying to pander to everyone with every feature available. (Our marketing does reflect this as well.. see the portion about less "bling") We don't feel the need to cram every feature and option into the user interface. We prefer a more streamlined, less bloated approach. With the available filters, hooks and the ability to target all of the form elements for CSS manipulation, Gravity Forms remains pretty lean and still very powerful and extensible. If you really want a lot of admin options and prefer not to learn any CSS, then another form solution might be in order.

So, if you want some CSS or formatting assistance, please ask away. We have some very very experienced developers on staff here that will be thrilled to help you out. Give it a shot. You might just learn something awesome along the way and it's a win/win for everyone.

Posted 11 years ago on Tuesday October 9, 2012 | Permalink
sharonq
Member

Seriously - getting two fields on the same line should be possible without CSS.

Your drag and drop interface needs updated.

This is not "advanced"

Neither is controlling the background color or putting a border around a box.

Please understand that many of your clients are neither familiar with CSS no comfortable with it so what seems 'easy' to you is not for us.

Does that sound like a feature war? or bling?

Posted 11 years ago on Tuesday October 9, 2012 | Permalink
Kevin Flahaut
Administrator

Sharon, Thanks for the feedback. We will take it into consideration. We appreciate your opinion, but I'm simply not going to argue the point here.. this is a support forum and not the venue for this type of conversation.

Posted 11 years ago on Tuesday October 9, 2012 | Permalink

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