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Once in the edit section of your form, the right hand side of the interface is where most of the work in creating your form will take place.

To add a field:

1. Find the field you want to add to the form
2. Click on it to add it bellow the last field in the form OR click, hold and drag the field to the position you want it in the form

Now that you’ve added a field to your form, you’ll probably want to modify it in some way before the form is ready for use.

To view and edit a field’s settings, click on the field when it is in your form and the right hand menu will change to display a new set of options.

As you can see there are multiple sections that provide settings that can be changed for a field. All fields have these sections but the contents of them varies depending on the type of field.

The General section will contain a text box for the field display name and the field description. These will both display above the field when the user is completing the form. They will be in any field’s General settings section.

As previously mentioned, a field’s unique settings are most likely to be found in their General settings section.

The Appearance tab does what it says on the tin, in this section are options to change how the field looks. There are some unique options based on the field, but these are usually the amount of placeholders to set if the field has multiple inputs.

Placeholders are the first setting in the options section and are used to show the person submitting the form what sort of information this field is looking for.

Other appearance options refer to the placement of the description and sub-label and whether to display or hide the field’s label. There isn’t a lot of flexibility with these options, only whether to display them above or below the field.

Advanced settings aren’t as difficult as they sound and provide useful tools to help design a very affective form.

The first option you can define in the advanced section is the “Admin Field Label” this is a name that you can set the field which is only used to define it when viewed in the back end. If you have a lot of fields in a form and/or use an form submission for other Gravity Forms features, such as generating a PDF, then having your fields identified in some sort of labelling system is very useful.

Default Value is the next option you’ll find in the Advanced section similarly to the aforementioned placeholders found in the general section, the amount of options for this are dependant on the field and it places whatever you define in the settings into the field. The difference with default values, however, is that these will be saved with the entry unless changed and act as if the person submitting the form has entered it themselves.

Gravity Forms has a variety of fields which gives you a lot of options for how the form is completed, as well as the functionality of the form.

Add ons can be integrated onto your WordPress site which add more field options to your form. But with the “vanilla” Gravity Forms plugins you will have 3 categories of fields. Note: some add ons can add fields to these categories too.

• Standard Fields
• Advanced Fields
• Post Fields

Depending on the purpose of your form will determine which type of field you use and how often you use them.

Standard Fields: contain short and “simple” fields which are likely to be used often and apart from the “paragraph text” field, require little input from the user.

Advanced Fields: often can be achieved by using fields from the Standard Fields list but have built functionality for things such as formatting. An example of this is the “Phone” field which has built in options for different types of phone number formatting. Capturing a phone number could be done with a “Single Line Text” field but would lack a lot of usability.

Post Fields: are used for purely for looks and are not used by the person filling out the form. They are used to add images and text that can be used to instruct the person filling out the form or just to make the form look prettier.

Add ons were previously mentioned and there are many official, certified and unofficial add ons that can improve the already powerful WordPress form plugin, it really depends on your need. For example, two forms can be in one form by using a Nested Form field which is very useful if the form you are creating requires adding one or more persons details.

1. Navigate to the Gravity Forms section in the left-hand side of the WordPress dashboard, and click on “Forms” at the top of it.
2. You will now see a list of forms (if any are created already) and you can create a form by clicking the “Add New” button in the top half of the page.

3. A pop up window will appear which is where you can name your form by filling in “Form Title” and also give it a description which is not mandatory. Both the title and description can be changed after completion. Click “Create Form” to finish the process.

4. You should arrive at the form edit screen for the form you just created. Congratulations, you have a new Gravity Form!

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