On Carl Hancock’s Twitter account, he has been letting people know about upcoming changes to Gravity Forms that may interest some of you. All of the following is public information, and not some special inside information that I have working at rocketgenius. These plans could change, as they aren’t official statements, but I thought some of you might enjoy a quick look at what’s happening.
CRM Abilities – Gravity Forms is going to let you add contacts and businesses to Gravity Forms so that you can manage your connections and contacts.
@joeventures @saddington @chrislema We're working on a Contacts Add-On for Gravity Forms that will have some CRM functionality.
— Carl Hancock (@carlhancock) March 11, 2013
Hosted E-mail – Many people have had issues with Gravity Forms sending notification messages, thanks in large part to the complexities of sending e-mail. I had an idea it was complex, but after supporting the issues for more than a year, I now have an appreciation of how difficult it can be to send an e-mail from one server to another.
Gravity Forms is going to be providing a hosted e-mail solution that’ll bypass some of the complexities by getting the e-mail sent from a trusted service.
@sabreuse We'll be building a hosted email solution specifically for Gravity Forms later this year using an existing service as a partner.
— Carl Hancock (@carlhancock) May 16, 2013
Stripe – If you want to purchase Gravity Forms, you currently need to use Paypal, but soon it will switch to Stripe instead.
We'll actually be switching to @Stripe from PayPal completely very soon. Just need to get our affiliate program moved to HasOffers first.
— Carl Hancock (@carlhancock) June 20, 2013
HasOffers – As you can see from the proceeding tweet, Gravity Forms will also be moving its affiliate system from e-Junkie to HasOffers. Not sure what this will mean for us, but expect to see more news on this soon.
Reoccurring Payments – Gravity Forms currently doesn’t allow you to subscribe to renew your license, and as such, there have been people that have accidentally let their license lapse. Gravity Forms will soon let you have it set-up so that your license is a reoccurring payment.
@vidluther We also don't do recurring payments now. When we move to Stripe we'll be implementing recurring payments for renewals.
— Carl Hancock (@carlhancock) June 20, 2013
Discount Changes – It looks like you will need to subscribe for reoccurring payments of Gravity Forms if you want to maintain your renewal discount.
@vidluther So the renewal discount will be offered as an incentive for users to sign up for automatic renewals.
— Carl Hancock (@carlhancock) June 20, 2013
Ticket Based Support – I feel bad when I overlook or miss a ticket on our support forums, and as our support requirements increase, so does the chances your support request will be missed by the team because of how quickly other requests are stacked up on top of each other.
Soon, Gravity Forms will have a complete ticket based system for all support needs, meaning there will be full tracking on our end to make sure every ticket is addressed.
@snickn But ALL of our support will be moving to ticket based from forums later this year. It's just easier to provide better support.
— Carl Hancock (@carlhancock) June 13, 2013
Documentation Moving to Custom Post Types – Currently, Gravity Forms uses WikiMedia to manage documentation, but it looks like we will be changing to Custom Post Types in WordPress to achieve the functionality and ease of use going forward.
@tw2113 But we're going to be overhauling our documentation and will simply be using a custom post types with our own added functionality.
— Carl Hancock (@carlhancock) June 14, 2013
If you want to know more about what might be coming down the pipe with Gravity Forms, I highly suggest following Carl on Twitter.
Malcolm's Ramblings 