Gravity Forms is one of the most advanced forms creation and management plugins for WordPress.  People use it for all sorts of things: contact forms, surveys, order forms, directories, and mailing list signup forms.

Jeff Matson, part of the team at RocketGenius (the folks that make Gravity Forms), cooked up a beautifully simple plugin to integrate Postmatic with your existing Gravity forms.

Things you can do with Postmatic + Gravity Forms

Let people subscribe to your site when they are filling out your contact form

Easy. They’ve already give you their email address. One more checkbox and they’re on your list.

Create your own 100% customized subscribe widget

Create a new Gravity Form and use the native Gravity widget to stick it in your sidebar or footer.

Create a signup form to let people choose to subscribe to posts as they happen (Postmatic) or a digest (through Mailchimp or Aweber).. or both.

Already sending a weekly newsletter but also want to let users subscribe to posts via Postmatic? This is the one for you. Give your users a choice.

Let customers join your list when purchasing a product

If you are using Gravity Forms for simple ecommerce, make sure you grab that subscription at the point of sale.

There are so many ways to capture subscribers in Postmatic that we’ve compiled a full list of them for you here.

Get started

We’ve created a tutorial on how to get started with Gravity Forms. You can find it on our support site or in the new help area of Settings > Postmatic.

Gravity Forms (premium) joins Caldera Forms (free) to nicely round out the form packages that support Postmatic. Thanks, Jeff!

Comment moderation can be a drag. On larger sites it can even be a part time job. While WordPress has some pretty useful moderation rules available nothing beats human intelligence.

If you have lots of comments it probably means you have lots of commenters. Let’s put some of those extra brains to work.

Today we release Crowd Control. It’s free and available now in the WordPress repository.

Crowd Control modifies your comment area to add a little box to the top of each comment. Users can report comments as inappropriate with a quick click. When a comment has been reported as offensive by a couple of people (you can set the threshold) it’ll be sent back to moderation and we’ll notify you via email.

Under the hood there is a lot of intelligence and security checks keeping people from abusing the system and burying comments just to be mean.

It’s pretty simple but like a lot of things relating to WordPress commenting – it hasn’t been done right before. We’re willing to take the gamble that it is needed.

Go ahead and take a vacation

Let your users keep your comments area clean while you are gone. That’s why we called it Crowd Control.

We have lots of great ideas of where we can take this next, and you can get involved on Github. Crowd Control is already integrated into Epoch but soon it’ll be so in an even smoother way. The same goes for Postmatic integration. The moderation emails sent from Crowd Control aren’t the same beautiful (and replyable) ones that you get from Postmatic Premium but we’ll fix that up in a jiffy. Give it a week.

Download Crowd Control from http://wordpress.org/plugins/crowd-control.

Danny Brown told us he was writing a piece about Postmatic to be featured on WPKube. He said there would be some charts.

We thought oooh charts.

What we saw next made the whole team here prouder than you could know.

As you can see, in the seven months prior to installing Postmatic, my comment count per month averaged 149 comments per month. In the seven months since implementing Postmatic, that jumps to 312.

That’s more than doubled my average comment count!

Danny Brown via WPKube

That chart is a reflection of the success of Postmatic. It’s proof that what we are doing works, and people love it. I couldn’t be more inspired. I’ve printed it out and stuck it to the wall.

Help us spread the message

As a startup these numbers mean the world to us – because we made it happen. We set out to do something and have found success in it:

And read it for yourself

Danny’s piece provides the big picture of what you can do with Postmatic. He’s clearly figured out how to leverage our technology for huge gains on his own sites.

Head over to WPKube to check it out and leave a comment. Maybe he’ll share his secrets.

Have you ever wanted to add a checkbox to your contact form to let people subscribe to Postmatic while they are leaving you a note? 

Or maybe create a widget which lets users subscribe to either posts (Postmatic) or digests (via Mailchimp)?

How about letting people subscribe to Postmatic when purchasing a t-shirt?

Take a little Caldera Forms….

Caldera Forms is a plugin from CalderaWP which offers form creation via a simple drag and drop interface. We love Caldera Forms because it is free, GPL, and built for high extendability and flexibility. Anyone needing something more than a contact form but not wanting to pay yearly license fees should definitely check it out.

And add a lot of Postmatic.

Josh over at CalderaWP (also head developer of Epoch) cooked up an addon plugin which lets Caldera Forms talk to Postmatic. With it you can add a checkbox to any form that will trigger a Postmatic subscription request.

By combining Caldera Forms with Postmatic, you can easily create and customize forms for capturing new blog subscribers.

What you’ll need

You need to have three plugins installed: Postmatic, Caldera Forms, and Postmatic for Caldera Forms.

How it works

After you’ve got Postmatic for Caldera Forms installed and activated Postmatic will be registered as a new Processor.

The following directions assume that you have already created a form. Within Caldera Forms, open up one of your forms for editing. Click on the Processors option in the navigation menu. Next, click on the Add Processor button.

Click on the Use Processor button next to the Postmatic option.

The Form Processors box will close and a Settings form will appear. Fill in the boxes next to Email Address, First Name, Last Name, and Success Message.

There are handy buttons to let you fill these fields with the corresponding data that you collect in your form.

Consider making the processor conditional

Processors can be triggered conditionally. You don’t want anyone submitting your contact form to be subscribed via Postmatic… only the folks who want to be. Click on the Conditions button on the Processor screen and configure the Processor to only run when a certain box is checked. Something like this:

When finished, click on the blue Update Form button at the top of the screen.

The new checkbox on your form will send users the usual opt-in confirmation email from Postmatic. The Postmatic Processor runs in parallel with any other form processors so you can do things like use it on order forms, contact forms, widgets, surveys, etc.

Enjoy the world of possibilities with this new integration. Thanks to the folks at CalderaWP for making it happen.