News & Updates -
By Gravity FormsPublished December 21, 2022
2022 has been a busy and exciting year for Gravity Forms, with the acquisition of Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts, the release of 2.6, 2.7 beta, and a number of new add-ons, the relaunch of our YouTube channel, the return of in-person events, and much more!
As always, we’d like to thank everyone in the Gravity Forms community for your ongoing support. It was amazing to be able to meet some of our long-standing customers at WordCamp US and San Jose – we look forward to connecting with more people in-person in 2023.
In this ‘2022: Year in Review’ article, we share some of the big milestones we have celebrated, discuss the on going innovations of Gravity Forms, and look at what you can expect from us in 2023.
Let’s jump in…
Gravity Forms 2.6
2022 saw the release of Gravity Forms 2.6. With a focus on improving the form editor, 2.6 streamlined the form creation process, helping users create better forms faster.
We were delighted with the reaction from our community to 2.6, and the fast uptake of this version of Gravity Forms – an especially big thank you to everyone who installed the beta and provided us with feedback.
2.6 features included:
- Embed Form Flyout –The Embed Form flyout utilizes the WordPress Block editor, enabling you to add a form to a new or existing page, post, or custom post type, from directly within the form editor.
- Inline Submit Button – With Gravity Forms 2.6 the Submit Button and its settings relocated to the form editor, allowing you to easily set your Submit button to be inline with the last row of fields without having to rely on CSS Ready Classes.
- Choices Flyout – Editing the options within a multichoice field had historically been difficult due to the narrow sidebar. Gravity Forms 2.6 shipped with an expandable Choices flyout that is responsive to page width, giving you all the space you need to create, edit, and manage your Choices’ options within the form editor.
Gravity Forms 2.6 also included Ajax form saving, giving you a faster and smoother experience when making updates, as well as an improved merge tag UI with search functionality added in, enabling you to easily search for the merge tags you need.
Find out more about the features that were included in Gravity Forms 2.6.
Gravity Forms 2.7 RC 1
In the last few months, we have seen the release of Gravity Forms 2.7, first as a beta and now as a Release Candidate, and we can’t wait for its official launch – coming soon in 2023!
Gravity Forms 2.7 beta 1 is available to install and test in a sandbox environment. As always with our major releases, 2.7 is packed with impressive new features, which will help to improve the user experience for both new and existing customers – from the installation of Gravity Forms, to the creation and styling of forms.
Features include…
- A new built-in form template library that boasts an assortment of premade, fully-customizable form templates, helping you to get started with any project in a matter of minutes.
- A new front-end form theme, named Orbital, and block styling settings that will enable you to easily customize the appearance of your forms, no CSS needed.
- A redesigned Setup Wizard, giving new customers a user-friendly experience from the get-go.
- And honeypot enhancements that will add yet more spam protection to your forms!
Gravity Forms 2.7 also sees a significant shift in how we build our products. Moving forwards the focus is on using React and our new component library to create our back-end UI – which will significantly benefit our developer community, and their experience building on Gravity Forms.
To find out more about 2.7, and how to install and test 2.7 RC 1, check out this article – Are You Ready to Test Gravity Forms 2.7 Release Candidate 1?
New Add-Ons and Features
As you can see, our Product team has been hard at work this year, and it doesn’t stop there! We’ve released a number of new add-ons, as well as incorporated new features to many of our integrations…
- Google Analytics Add-On – With our new Google Analytics Add-On, you’ll find a powerful tool that enables you to reliably track form performance. Seamlessly send form submission and form pagination related events to your Google Analytics service, allowing you to better understand the effectiveness of your forms and how your audience interacts with them.
- Moderation Add-On beta – With the Moderation Add-On, there is now a way to mitigate toxic form entries to help ensure they don’t cause harm to those receiving them. Currently released as a beta, the Moderation Add-On will filter your form entries based on toxicity, helping to protect you and your employees from online abuse and harassment.
- Stripe Add-On 5.0 beta – Currently in beta, Stripe Add-On 5.0 sees support for both Stripe Payment Element and Stripe Link, providing merchants with additional payment options for customers – including ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay – and a smoother, faster checkout experience.
- Gravity Forms Stripe App – The Stripe App Marketplace launched in May, and we were delighted to be one of the first apps to be included in this marketplace. With the Gravity Forms Stripe App, you can view all your Gravity Forms entries within your Stripe dashboard, as well as add notes. This not only adds context to your Stripe transactions, but it also gives you fuller insight into your customers and business.
- Integration with the Stripe Customer Portal – Managing payments and subscriptions got a whole lot easier with the release of Stripe Add-On 4.2. With the integration of the Stripe Customer Portal, merchants can now allow customers to self-manage their subscriptions, update credit card information, view payment history, and more.
- Continuous Subscriptions with Square – With the release of Square Add-On 1.6, merchants found support for subscriptions that run indefinitely, so you can enable recurring payments that get charged once a month until they are canceled by the customer.
- Support for Additional PayPal Payment Buttons – PayPal Checkout Add-On 2.4 saw support for additional PayPal payment buttons, including Venmo, iDEAL, Giropay, Bancontact, Sepa, Sofort, and many more!
- Transfer by Zapier – The release of Zapier Add-On 4.2 incorporated support for Transfer by Zapier, a new feature from Zapier that allows you to send data in bulk to any of Zapier’s 4000+ integrations! This was a real game-changer for Gravity Forms users, as it allows for the transfer of all prior form submissions in one go – even if those entries are months (or years!) old.
Coming In 2023!
Aside from the imminent release of Gravity Forms 2.7, we are also excited about a number of other releases that we’ll be sharing with you in the not-very-distant future. These include…
- Geolocation Add-On – Get a better insight into where your users are based and enable address autocomplete on your forms with our Geolocation Add-On. Coming very soon!
- Conversational Forms Add-On – A much-requested feature, we’re currently putting the final touches on a new Conversational Forms Add-On that we can’t wait to share with you all!
- Gravity Forms 2.8 – Still under wraps at the moment, we’ll give you a sneak peek into the many features planned for 2.8 when we can!
Would you like to have a say on the future of Gravity Forms? Use the Gravity Forms Roadmap to submit a new idea or share your thoughts on other issues that you think would help make Gravity Forms an even better and more well-rounded product.
Acquisition of Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts
In August this year Rocketgenius, the company behind Gravity Forms, announced the acquisition of Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts – an exciting opportunity for Rocketgenius and the Gravity Forms community!
A natural addition to the Rocketgenius suite of products, the acquisition helps us to consolidate Gravity Forms’ position as the #1 form builder for businesses and web professionals, while allowing us to better help WordPress users create powerful form solutions that support and grow businesses.
- Gravity Flow – A well established Gravity Forms Certified Add-On, Gravity Flow allows users to create complex custom workflows, automating processes and integrations for businesses and organizations around the globe.
- Gravity Experts – A Gravity Flow sister company, Gravity Experts offers a VIP service, helping clients solve their unique business challenges using Gravity Forms, Gravity Flow, and any custom development necessary to fit specific needs.
Going forward, we are committed to further integrating Gravity Flow into our product suite, ensuring that all customers continue to benefit from upgrades, product developments, security, and support. We are excited with what the future holds for our company, our customers, and our products. Watch this space!
Relaunch of the Gravity Forms YouTube Channel
2022 has seen the relaunch of the Gravity Forms YouTube channel, and we’ve been delighted by how well the content has been received!
With a focus on educating our viewers on Gravity Forms and Gravity Flow – the types of forms you can create, the features available to use, and how to create custom solutions for your business or new project – we’ve created an avalanche of videos to cater for a wide variety of use cases.
And with new content released every Tuesday, make sure you subscribe to our channel. We always love to connect with members of our Gravity Forms community, so please like our videos and share any thoughts or feedback in the comments – we look forward to hearing from you!
Launch of Gravity Forms on TikTok
Alongside YouTube, we’ve also joined TikTok, where we are again sharing a wide selection of WordPress and Gravity Forms content to help educate and inspire our followers.
Or any of our other social media channels to stay up to date with everything Gravity Forms:
Return of In-Person Events
One of the highlights of 2022 for us here at Gravity Forms has been the return of in-person events and it was lovely to meet and chat with Gravity Forms fans, new and old, at a number of WordCamps this year.
Community is at the heart of all that we do, and we pride ourselves on supporting WordPress through the sponsorship of events, helping to foster relationships and engage with people around the globe. Alongside sponsoring WordCamp Europe, we had an in-person presence at WordCamp US and San Jose.
We now look forward to attending more WordCamps in 2o23 – the first being WordCamp Asia in February 2023. Gravity Forms will have a booth at WC Aisa, where you can come and meet us and get some free swag – we love to chat so if you’ve got a ticket for the event be sure to swing by our booth and say hi!
As well as in-person events, we also sponsored a number of virtual events, including WP Accessibility Day, a 24-hour global event dedicated to promoting and learning website accessibility best practices for WordPress websites. Gravity Forms is fully committed to accessibility and helping to make the web accessible to everyone – 2023 will see us continue to support and advocate for online accessibility!
Keep Up to Date With Gravity Forms News
As you can see, 2022 has been an action packed year for us here at Gravity Forms, and we can’t wait to jump into 2023!
To keep up to date with future announcements, make sure you sign up to our newsletter, where we share the latest Gravity Forms news, monthly updates, resources, articles from the blog, and much more…
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