 And how's it going everybody? Welcome to the first installment of the form of awesome flex course. That is kind of the first flex course being hosted by Reclaim at Tech. We appreciate you coming. And we are delighted to have Tom Woodward running this series for the remainder of June. And there will be four live sessions, each and every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern. And they'll get significantly more complex. This will be the kind of examples in opening and I'll let Tom go more into that. But I'm super excited because as I wrote about already a little bit and as I've been thinking about it, gravity forms really represents a kind of a way to think about not only WordPress as a tool, but a way to build tools on top of WordPress in a really sophisticated depending upon how deep you wanna go matter. And I think Tom will say a lot more about that more interestingly than me. So without further ado, I wanna bring Tom on stage and say hi, Tom. Welcome to flex course number one. And I'll leave it to you. If you need anything, any questions, I will at times come in and communicate with folks from Discord because I know you'll be in the stream. But there will be discussion and I know Tom always encourages that. So Tom, take it away and I'll be talking to you. Yep, I beg you to ask questions and slow me down or speed me up as we go along. This is, I think everybody knows me to some degree or some amount in here. So like, hopefully you believe I'm being honest there. And as we kind of get to know each other better in the world of gravity forms anyway, I'll get better at pacing things. And another thing that you can really help me with is like, after this round, I beg you to go and make something, write a blog post, talk in the Discord chat, the reclaim community, whatever, talk about it. Help me understand what you're doing and then we can kind of extend this conversation in some useful ways. So with that, I'm gonna get rolling here. Gravity forms is something that I've used for a large number of years to do many, many things. And the reason I am a fan is because I am somewhat chaotic by nature, but I like order in my stuff. So when I have things that can help me do it and help other people kind of do things in orderly ways, then I'm a fan. And that's what Gravity Form has let me do over time is I can do lots of stuff with it. I can just get data in all sorts of ways, not unlike, say, Google Forms, but unlike Google Forms, I have a lot more options and complexity there kind of built into the tool. And I have a lot more control over the visual experience as well as the kind of other end of it, which is when I wanna see that data and do things with that data, what can I do? In Google Forms, I tend to have to build a whole JavaScript front end and do all this stuff here with Gravity Forms. I can usually take advantage of WordPress, but I can also interact with other systems. And we'll see some examples of that in just a minute. So in my head, Gravity Forms is a tool for building tools and it's kind of in and of WordPress itself. So the reason I like that is because it helps me kind of build things faster because I'm not having to build in as many different environments and learn as many different things. It helps me work with people who understand bits and pieces of those environments. Gravity Forms itself is accessible so that I can usually rely on faculty members or people who are necessarily, you know, fully immersed in these systems to still be able to make some modifications. So that's a big deal for me is kind of keeping all the stuff sustainable for me. And the other piece that I like is that Gravity Forms has what I consider a low threshold, but a high ceiling. So you can get in and do stuff without needing to know a lot, but you can keep on building it. As you learn stuff, it's not stopping you. The other piece there is it's more of a gradient of complexity than a bunch of high steps. So you can gradually accrue knowledge over the years and get better and better at stuff. And I know we don't have to think about it quite this way because Reclaim is providing you with the elite license and all the add-ons, but I think it's like $90 a year for that. And, you know, what I always do, because I'm a cheap guy, I don't like to spend money, is I usually have to talk myself into it and go like, all right, how much do I get paid an hour and how much time am I gonna save by using something like this, as opposed to building it from scratch or cobbling together something from a variety of free solutions. So if you need to justify things in your own head, that's not a bad way to do it. So with that intro, I'm gonna show you a few examples. Now, some of these examples you may have seen before if you did the Reclaim Admin piece before, but I also built in some more. So let me share, I'm just gonna share the entire screen. So I'm gonna start with just collecting information as an example and talk a little bit about some of your options here, because this is to me the easiest thing to do and where you can just kind of save little bits of time and get more interactions and pretty easily do some interactions with other systems. In this particular example, this is the group I work with now, D-Link, Digital Learning Inquiry, and we have people who wanna talk to us. So we have a bunch of required fields, but different roles. And so what happens in this particular case is if you do faculty, this message with all of its pieces is gonna be sent via email, one place, but also it goes automatically to a channel in Slack for faculty requests. I think it also does staff, but if you chose student, it's gonna go to a different channel in Slack that's monitored by our interns. So not magic or particularly exciting there, but it's just a little piece of how you can use a form, you can start to interact with your other systems and kind of consolidate your workflows, take advantage of the things that different things do well. They were doing this entirely via email previously and now since I can claim and say I'm doing stuff in Slack live, that saves everybody extra emails and garbage like that. Now also, I can send out a URL and see right now topic for consultation is just the stuff, but if I use a URL in a particular email or for a page and I allowed it to be filled via the parameters, which will show it automatically chooses and fills in data. So you can pre-fill forms via URL on the fly so that faculty have less stuff to fill, which includes, it increases the rate of response and it increases the likelihood that they're gonna write the right thing in the boxes and those things can be hidden as well. So that opens up a couple doors. So that's just getting data. And I mean, this can be as sophisticated as you want with what branching logic and all sorts of things. They've got some really great options. So we'll go through pieces of the different fields in a minute. I wanna show you a couple more about content creation just to show you the scope and variety there. In this case, we had students submitting biology articles. If you look at how it's broken down, this isn't particularly sophisticated. This wasn't even using the fancy advanced post-creation thing. All we wanted to do is get a featured image, a title and we just have blocks that they fill in. And it's all kind of pre-thought out. Put your entry paragraph here, your second image here. Now this is not about gaining digital fluency or being super creative in what you're writing. It's about being able to create really consistent content in a way that requires very little skill or interaction with the tool. And it does what it says it does, nice and clean. Does the structures, that's all we're asking and all we want from it. So I think that's part of it. It's like this doesn't have to be a monumental thing. It can be as simple as you need it to be. And here's another biology example that's kind of going a little bit more. You can see we have multiple authors. We have categories getting involved. We've got keywords and titles and then a whole different pattern of writing that goes into this. And the nice thing is it's whatever the faculty member wants. So I wasn't arguing about whether this was a good idea or not necessarily because I liked aspects of it, some of it I didn't as much. But you can see we've got students making content. It's rich media content and it's pretty cool. And they're able to do it without user accounts or anything like that. And they can do it exactly how the faculty member wants. Real quick, just to get into stuff that's a little more fun, a little more complex. This is the dichotomous key. I showed this in the other one, but as you're kind of learning as you do this. So it's walking you through the process of identifying a plant via a dichotomous key or at least doing parts of it. So as you go through here, when I finally get down to choosing my final selection, oh, that's a low belief. What you're seeing is I'm populating all these hidden fields with all this stuff. And this one was really focused on doing this via a phone. So when you would trigger this camera thing, you'd have the option to look at the phones, photo catalog or use the live camera. So it let you submit things via gravity forms with a great deal of information, none of which you're kind of putting in directly. You're doing the stuff you understand, like your name and if you had a guess for the plant and any additional notes, then it all goes into the database. So that is pretty interesting and that's using all kind of pretty standard WordPress stuff. Now you can start to integrate with other systems like this is one about trying to decide if service learning is right for you. The idea with this group was they wanted people to be able to go through a series of questions and see what they thought about things. And so what this does is it's gonna build us a little upload chart of what we decided to do. So this is mixing a little bit of programming, which is what builds this crazy thing. And so we can see from the dark lines what paths we took to come to our decision. And it's creating these posts so we'd be able to see and reflect on them if we wanted to. But just an example, this is Mermaid.js, which is a flowchart thing that I just happened to find and be able to build to address a particular faculty member's needs. I'll show you one more of the odder side of creation. This was for an artfulness class. What it's doing is we're able to do blackout poetry here. And in this case, we can select a particular source material. We can black out the pieces we want and we submit it. And here you go, we end up with our poem. And that's just using gravity forms to handle the submission process and some JavaScript to write what it is that the content of the post is. So it's a little bit about thinking through creatively how you wanna interact with this stuff. And this is things I did before at any idea what I was doing programming wise. So when I say there's a gradient of accessibility, like you can do a lot of stuff before you necessarily know what's going on really. So with that, like there's a couple of examples. Do we have anything that you wanna see that we haven't seen? Cause there's more complex stuff like we aren't gonna get into content creation in this round, right? We're gonna work on like what are our pieces through which we can collect information and how many choices do we have? And then can we do redirections? Can we do emails to different people? And then I think in sessions two and three, we'll get more into submitting content and then customizing content with different HTML templates and that sort of thing. So Tom, one of the questions you did from Ed Beck in Discord is he's interested in the ability to include a piece of text and code based on a question. And I mean, essentially that's it. So I mean, if you just think about it this way, anything we can solicit in gravity forms, we can put into a post or more things really, you know? So now we just have to look at like, how do we do that? And what are the things that we might collect and how do we start to blend those things together? Which is where we start to get into that line of like, do you wanna learn a bit of HTML? Do you wanna learn a bit of CSS? You know, I think you do. I encourage you to. I think it'll be cool. And we can start to pick out those pieces and kind of see how this stuff starts to interact. But the first thing I think we wanna do if you'll join me in your sandbox, let's make a new form and take a look at some of these pieces. So I'm just gonna make a test form and I can't easily see if you're with me. So I'm gonna go a little bit slow there. Yeah, I know Ed wants to do the creative commons attribution thing. Sure, we can do that for sure, no problem. Couple different ways. And we'll get into it. Maybe at the end of this, we'll see how much time we have. And if I have a second, I'll show you like three different ways you could do it, which is annoying, but I like to show off, right? Or I at least like to show people different options so they can pick the one that kind of fits them best. So with that, I'm gonna break down some of these pieces. Some of this stuff may seem obvious, but if you'll bear with me a little bit, there are some hidden pieces here that are worth seeing and as we kind of piece through them, I think we'll get at it, things that maybe you wouldn't have seen necessarily, hopefully. So all you have to do to add a field is click on it. Once you've added this field, you can select it and now you're in field settings. There's a couple of things to take note of here, like ID one, because it's the first one we created, it will be ID one and they'll go sequentially, but you can also drag them and that will change the order of the item, but not the IDs. So that's something to keep track of for later when we start to implement like the integrations of these things. And if you delete one, that ID has been assigned and the next one will skip a number to your perception anyway. So with tech stuff, there's not a ton you can do here. You can label it. My favorite pet. All right. And I can add a description that gives a little bit more information despite the fact that I like dogs. So as you start to go through here, you can see where it's gonna show up automatically is underneath the text field. And I don't like that. I tend to change that for the form as a whole but I'm also gonna show you since we're just in the field part where you can change it for the field. Do note these input masks can be really useful if you're doing something that either has one built in, right? So if I wanted phone number here, that's gonna automatically do that or if I wanna do something custom. So like their example too is really great. So if you wanted to do like a course code, it's a little bit like regex but it enables you to enforce a pattern here for people. And if you've ever asked people to stick to a particular pattern, you'll find that that is a really handy thing to be able to give to people. Again, you can make it required. This is a nice piece that you'll see repeated, no duplicates. So if you wanted to say like, I don't know if you had anything where you needed this not to be a duplication, you can make it so that this is not duplicated by any of the prior submissions to this form. So if it was like come up with a unique name for your team, you might wanna put no duplicates here. So everyone is not named, I don't know, the Dallas Cowboys. All right, a little bit of a breath there. I'll flip into Discord. Any question? Yeah, like regex but easier to use. Any significantly advanced regex is like magic. So I agree, it's like a simpler thing there and you can not go insane probably, but you can also, if you get into programming, you can write your own custom validators and use full regex. So let's look at appearance. This is that little placeholder text and I think it does a really good job now with the JavaScript piece to be able to see what's going on here. And then this is where you can change other stuff. Like you can hide the label, but it warns you, which is another good thing about some of these accessibility pieces. Cause that's one of the problems with forms is that if you're not careful, it's easy to make forms that are not good in terms of WCAG 2.0 accessibility, but gravity forms does a pretty good job awarding you. Now here is where I put above the inputs and it moves the directions a little bit higher above the field. I don't know why I like that, but I do like it better. If you're doing validation and things, you can assign custom messages like, hey, you have to do this, don't forget or something like that, but you'd be making this field required. And those of you who know a bit of CSS, this is where you can assign classes and things like that, which is super handy. And you can also set the size of this field to kind of more accurately represent the kind of content you're seeking. So again, I know this is not like super exciting, but like these little pieces and kind of having a vague memory that this is possible, they all add up. Tom, I have to say your pacing is perfect though, cause I can follow along cleanly. Do everything you're doing. So if it works for me, I have to assume people are quicker than me. So you're doing great. All right, cause this is always my terror guys and gals and anything else. I hate when I can't like see people well and get some feel for how it's going. So, you know, scream at me if anything is wrong. If anything is wrong. Admin field label. This can actually be a useful thing. And have I ever used it? Maybe like once. But like, if you have a long thing here, like says please list your favorite pet on the admin side, you could just write F-A-V pet, right? So it slims things down on the side where you don't have to over explain things to yourself, which is super nice. And you can also do these things like setting the default value for something. Like say you are asking something about where someone lives and you knew most of your people were in Virginia, you could set a default value of Virginia if you wanted to. The autocomplete stuff is gonna be again around kind of accessibility and pieces like that. I haven't used that a ton, but it enables things like names and credit card information and stuff like that to go through a little bit more easily. Now I use this stuff down here quite a bit. Visible is just normal. Hidden is not viewable to the people submitting the form and but it is a part of the form. So it means you can fill it in via this dynamic population which we'll look at in just a second or other methods there. So it's just you don't want a human putting stuff in there but you might wanna put stuff in there on the front end dynamically in some way, shape or form. And then there's administrative. This could be like in one of the cases that we did, we had teams that were assigned but the students submitting the form weren't assigning the teams. It was being assigned by the faculty member when she went back through and looked at the submission. So that might be an administrative example of a field that be filled out once the forms were submitted to gravity forms and then we went to look here under entries. And then there's my favorite little trick here. Allow field to be populated dynamically and you just name what this thing is. And it's just gotta be unique and it's easier if you kind of keep it without spaces and stuff. I think there's ways to do that but I never ever bother. So that's that dynamic population and you can see it right here. I think I used to be able to do large text. I can't anymore but what I have written here is goal equals digital tools. And in this case I could do like fav pet equals, I don't know, Bosco or Goat or something when I provision the parameter in the URL and it would automatically write whatever I set that value to be. And that can be kind of useful because you can send people those URLs, you could have those URLs associated with buttons, you could do other tricks like that. So do keep in mind this idea of dynamic population because it can be used that way and it can also be used in the actual short code where you embed the field. You have a question, Tom, from Taylor of all people asking, that admin field label would be visible in the WordPress interface or via code and stuff or both? Both. Question mark. Yeah, both. Both. Yep, yep. Yeah, how's that for an answer? Yes, cake, eat and half. In most cases that's what's gonna happen. So pretty much if it's in here, I can get to it through code and I guess that's that, no and. So this isn't a particularly useful thing quite yet. So let me do a paragraph text piece, that's the next form. So I'm not gonna do conditional logic yet because I'm gonna want like a radio button or something probably to do some conditional logic and paragraph text has a couple different components. So I'm not gonna go through all those pieces again with you but I am gonna show you, in this case, you have your pet bio here. I can set my maximum characters, 3,000. I don't know what it would take to get a duplicate there but you could say don't do it. Field size again, it gives you similar options but compresses in a different way. So that can be handy to know. And here's something that happens with this particular field that I think is really worth seeing. So here under advanced, I can say use the rich text editor and all of a sudden I've got kind of that simplified editing interface. Now the things it's not gonna do, it's not gonna do image uploads within this piece but pretty nice, pretty handy, lets you do some solid things and makes kind of the possibility of submissions a little more complex, right? So as you can see here, these are pretty straightforward things. Drop down, let's see what it looks like. Only annoying thing is the next one always opens at the last thing you had, so it bops me into advanced, that may seem a little bit confusing but for things like drop downs and radio buttons and that sort of stuff, you're just, you're editing choices now. Whoops, there we go. And the stuff you wanna know here, hot dogs, ham, pigs feet, since I'm in Alabama right now. All right, so you can add your stuff if you needed to shift it because you've added a lot of stuff, you can do that. Here's something that I didn't use enough but you can is the show values. So what I can do here is again, it's about showing the person submitting the stuff, the simplest things you can, the stuff that makes the best sense to them but that might not be the same thing you want on your user side. So say I wanted classes. I could set pig feet as a class, hot dog, ham. And now they're lowercase, there's no spaces. I'm dealing with stuff I would have had to hassle around ordinarily but the user's experience is still nice and pleasant. So that can't be overstated as being important. And you see here, the pluses add another one and the minuses take it away. I'll also note that you can bulk add things. They have a bunch of built-in things, which is cool. So if I wanted to do countries, there we go. With a lot of countries, I would hate to have to type that in. And you can also cut and paste those things in from like a spreadsheet or something so that can save you huge amounts of time. Don't ever get stuck in here, like trying to write things manually and reshifting to deal with the alphabet. If you've got a big list, keep it in the spreadsheet, add to it there, sort it, and then cut and paste it in. Pro tip, not that that's genius but I have been stupid enough not to do stuff like that in the past, trust me. All right, so you see how that starts to work? All right, I've got my choices. Do note that you wanna save this every so often. And then let's go back here. And maybe that's enough for right now and we'll make a page. Now this is nice because they fill out this part and it kinda shows you a progress bar along the top. This is a lot like what we're doing on where is our, oh, that's where it is. So when we do our super friends trivia, that's what's going on here. We just have a page for each question and that's how we do our progress piece. So just nice. Again, it's about making people feel like they're getting stuff done so that they get it done and so they understand where they are. This is all about making people feel good about filling this form out, which is something that's nice to be able to control and to be able to deal with in lots of different ways. So let's throw another paragraph piece in there and this time let's take a look at the conditional logic. So do be careful if you turn on conditional logic and don't set anything, it will still be on and that stuff will be hard to find, chances are. So do notice that and this is about showing or hiding if all or any of the following rules match. So since I said don't choose a dog, I could say hide this if you chose a dog or I could say choose your favorite food. Notice it does give you options to do stuff if it's left empty, but I can also hide it if your favorite food was hot dogs. So again, not rocket science, but a fair degree of complexity here and I'd probably want that to be either. So if either you wrote your favorite pet as a dog or you said your favorite food is hot dogs, then in both cases this field would be hidden. How does that feel? This court is silent. If no one else has said I do, I would like to see that conditional locket logic in your example again, because one of the things I find when dealing with gravity forms a little that this has been very useful in your pacing is like when you add the new bit, whether it's the paragraph, whether it's the drop down, the fact that you gotta go to settings and then go to the sidebar and there's a kind of rhythm that it's not apparent. I'll add it and go to the sidebar and then I get confused about where I am and kind of that flow of working it always keeps me a step behind but your pacing allows me to catch back up. So I'd love to see that conditional logic again personally. Yes, awesome. Thank you, Jim. I love you and I greatly appreciate it. So I'm gonna do this because this is, I agree, like it's a little bit disconcerting because what I think you would expect is right now, so I'm on this older one and I had the advanced tab open. I'm gonna go back to add fields and I'm gonna click on paragraph field. And what I'd expect is when I click here that it would open in general, the top one, but you kind of, when you added it, one, it doesn't automatically select it and then two, it puts you back in the same field or like permissions area that you were on the last one. What I think it should do is go to general automatically. So I think if you add a field, what it ought to do is auto-select it and move you to general, but it doesn't. So that's the thing to keep in mind. Let's just do it one more time. I agree. And I think the conditional logic is a good example because then I had to go down and it's easy given that they have a structure but based on where you are in the form and what you just added, it's easy to get confused. But I like that because your pacing allows us to and in fact, I'm gonna share a question here from Ed Beck is that on conditional logic, do you only control by individual question or can you conditional logic an entire block of questions? I think if you wanna do a whole block, you'd probably do a page and then set it on the page. So that's a way to do like a, or a section. I think we can do a section. Let's see. So if I do a section, let's add some fields in it and then we'll do another section. Let's see if we can do it that way. All right. Now let's see what happens when we do conditional logic on this. So I'm gonna hide this if my, choose your favorite food is hot dogs and let's see what happens. Whether it's just gonna, and I can, this is a good example. So I set some conditions and I'm gonna hit preview and see what it does. So it's gonna open it in a tab. There we go. Yeah. So that did do what we wanted. Nice. Great. I hope that helped Ed, but that's, it's also good just to see you go through it and then view it and then see what the results of that conditional logic leads to. It's nice to see that whole picture. So thanks. Yes. Here's another little pro trick. Let's see if it works. What you may find is that you're submitting a lot of things. So I'm just gonna submit that, right? And then I go back and I look at it and it didn't do what I wanted. Keep in mind, you can just hit, you know, like command back or the backspace and then the stuff will be filled in. So like if you're filling out a long form in your testing things and you don't wanna have to keep filling in that stuff, that's one way to save yourself a little time. The other thing that I'll suggest as a thing is don't set any of the stuff as required until the end after you've done all your testing or you'll hate yourself and have to unset it and then reset it. So that's a little tip from somebody who has spent a lot of time filling out forms that I didn't care about the actual information. Let's see what else here. So we did learn a little bit about sections and we know a little bit about pages which behave in a similar way. Sections are gonna be great for kind of creating content structure on a single form without the pagination and pagination to me is for kind of longer interactions or places where you feel like people are more likely to drop off but both of them really help you with structure. You can also throw in HTML elements like this and then it's not particularly friendly but you could write your HTML someplace else. I usually do and cut and paste it in. The one thing I will note here is whenever you see something like this, it looks almost like a Lego man's head but if you mouse over it, it says insert merged tags and it's really curly brackets with two dots but it just shows you some things that you could automatically put in there if you wanted to and these things vary a bit depending on where you are so you can see some stuff about like where they're coming from, user agent, a IP address, things like that which we probably don't care about but sometimes they can be useful. I think there was an important comment about actually making sure that you can break down the different brands of hot dogs whether it be Nathan's Hebrew National Ballpark and that was from our own Gordon so that was pretty fun. I didn't want you to miss that. No, I appreciate that and we can actually see how we might do that in just a second. So those are the basic fields, right? And here we are, about 40 minutes in. Cool. But then there's more stuff so I can collapse that and look at advanced fields. Now I might have a few more advanced fields than you because I've done one thing here which is you'll see add-ons on the left and I'll just go there for a second. It does warn me that I was about to lose some of this valuable information but if I go to add-ons there's a whole raft of stuff here and there's a couple that I particularly like and I can give you a list of these so you don't have to worry about it but advanced post-creation add-on, super useful. I do use a kismet sometimes but I can also show you all some other ways to deal with spam. Chain selects is pretty cool. I don't have it installed here but that would be our path for the hot dog thing. What we could do essentially with a CSV is if column one was like hot dogs and column two was various types and let's say in column one we also had, I don't know, types of sausages and other seasoned meats. What it would let you do is if you chose, it would show you two fields. The first one would be like choose the type of seasoned meat and if you chose hot dog, field two would only show you the elements related to hot dogs so that can be like super valuable and used to be a pain in the butt to make something like that. There's a brawl breaking out in discord around brands of hot dogs in New York. So just, you may not want to go deeper into hot dogs. Yeah, that was a mistake. But you can see all the other systems that Gravity Forms has official supported plugins to go with. So I think one of the questions I saw in at least one of the things was like how do I know about kind of Gravity Form extensions and add-ons? My general advice is start here and make sure it doesn't already exist here and then from there, you might have some different options. But I have some stuff like polls turned on. I have the quiz add-on. So this thing can do quizzes, at least simple quizzes and do the auto grading and stuff. That's what again, that Super Friends quiz is. You'll notice too, I have the Slack add-on which is the easy way you can then just pass this information into Slack channels with different types of formatting. Survey add-ons, one I usually turn on and then user registration. You can do all sorts of stuff with registering users with a little more customization and even creating sites and things for them in a multi-site environment. As an example, I set up just a press books multi-site so that people who want press books, not press books, H5P, H5P multi-site. I think I did a press books one too, actually. And that's what I use for the registration and the site creation piece. So it just neatens it up and it's a little more controllable by me. It's one reason to do it. And then webhooks that you tie it in to other things. And if any of you use Zapier or Zapier, maybe. That stuff is in there as well. So there's a raft of things in here that you can use right out of the box to interact with other systems or provide additional functionality that is well worth exploring. And then they have their certified add-ons which is a whole other chunk of stuff. It's pretty cool. So lots of different ways. It's pretty cool to see all of these like Slack. We use Zapier and the ways in which maybe we can bring some of this stuff in or even we were talking about press books earlier today with Ed Beck and some of that stuff. So it is super interesting just to see that. Not only is it just a form tool but the way it integrates with all these other tools. Mailgon is one I think about when we're doing stuff with Ghost or just there's a lot of interesting possibilities. I know one of the things that were brought up in Discord and I wanted to bring it on the screen is Meredith notes that the IP advanced field is super helpful from the support side. It's just one less thing to go back and say, hey, user, do you use this? And some kind of fields like that might be worth mentioning because there are ones where you don't even wanna ask the user. You can get from them just by being there. Absolutely, I think there are so many options for so many things. It can feel a little bit overwhelming at first. So I think you isolate your use case. That's kind of what I'm gonna encourage you to do after this is I'm showing you lots of stuff maybe that you don't care about but find something that you'd like to try this on that's a little bit on the edge of your comfort zone or that's been super annoying and other things and just isn't making you happy. Like it's like a rock in your shoe. Find something like that to focus on and that will help us get down to brass tech. So if like, okay, can we gather something like that automatically? And always what I'm asking myself is what's the least amount of information I can ask for? How can I make this feel as pleasant as possible? And one thing that this does do now, that I haven't shown is like, I can drag these pieces together and get them on the same line and kind of re-sort things. And I like that a lot. That's elegant. It makes it feel so much better. I really think, and you can do up to four items on a single line, but that's as most as it'll allow but this is a very different vibe after a while than just having this long feeling like never ending scrolls. So you can really think through, how am I gonna parse this out? What am I gonna make it look like? I have that control. It's one of the reasons I like it over gravity forms. It's like gravity forms, I mean, Google forms. I'm stuck with it. Exactly. Don't discount gravity forms in your own sense, please. Right. I'm stuck in Google forms with whatever Google wants it to look like. And that frustrates me at times. Sometimes I don't care what it looks like but a lot of times I do. I do have a question from you from Discord. It has been hopping and Ed Beck asked, with the user registration add-on, can you allow them to request a new site but require approval before it happens? That makes sense. Yeah, sure you could. Great. Yep, yep. That's a bit like, it's a bit like this. So I'll throw that in Discord. That's an example. Like it's way more complex but it's a good example of like whatever bizarre scenario you can think of, like you can do it. And what Ed's talking about is pretty, pretty straightforward. So a couple other pieces real quick. Let me, let me, that's where 48, geez, time flies. So we've got all these different pieces in here. You can kind of parse them out. Stuff I'll take note of is like, if I put name in and then I click on it, note that I can fill in things. I can have it happen automatically. And here it is. So under general, I can turn these on or off. So like, you know, if you wanted to prefix things so that faculty can write doctor PhD in there, you could allow it. But by default, you know, it's gonna give you first and last, but it's worth noting that that degree of sophistication is there. And the same thing is true with addresses. So how did you get there? I'm in, I'm just gonna play the role of the stupid gravity point user. And how did you get there when you were getting to the name piece? I clicked on my favorite pet, that field single line. And then where would I find those? Oh, just to add the feel. Or even to add the like name and stuff. Ah, so is that just a, because it seems different from the fields, right? What you're talking about when it's like single line text and then you're going on, is that to advanced fields? It is. Okay. I'm with you. No, I went kind of fast there. I'm happy now. Okay. Good. So you can control that stuff. The same thing is true with address. For instance, in a recent thing that I did, I didn't want street address. So I can undo that. I don't want that address line too. All I really want it was city, state and country. So the idea that you can kind of have a sophisticated field like this and then remove those things and then do stuff like set the default country to Aruba. You know, that kind of stuff really is about controlling the feel of this and how it's gonna behave and kind of what you think about it. Let me make sure I'm hitting the things that I wanted to make sure of. Rich text, values, yeah. Oh. Here's one that's like, this is the greatest thing. What a buildup, right? So this is under advanced fields and it's because I turned on one of the plugins, I think. But this idea of list, what it lets you do is you can just put items here as many items as you want. So I know one of the things that was discussed was maybe ingredients or I think maybe it was like, there was also another one around like audio plays or something like that. Hotdog brands at the good point. So it could be whatever and I could also spell it. So let's pretend I spelled it. So I could set the maximum number of rows or whatever. Let me save this form and hit preview and just show you what that looks like and how nice it could be. So down here under ingredients for hot dogs, I can write pork, hit this plus, sawdust, I'm not sure what else, seasonings. We don't wanna know. But this right here is super nice. Like the idea that you can give a structure to a thing but not a limit to it necessarily or a limit within a certain amount. So these things could be ingredients for a recipe. It could be composers involved in a particular musical score but it just gives you a little bit of flexibility and structure at the same time. And that's not a common option with forms. I wonder this, when I'm in that and I kinda following along again, the pacing is excellent. And so when I'm in there and I have ingredients, right? Like you do, how did you add pork in? And then more ingredients. When I try and click that plus button, is there something special I need to do? No, what I did here, Jim, is this is the editor view. And what I did is I moved too quickly to preview to show you what it's gonna look like for the submitter. Got it. So that's what. When you wanted to add those ingredients, the actual person would add that. Would we add a list? Got it. Okay, thank you. It's a free form entry list. And then what happens is as those things get submitted, you could do different things with them. Like let me show you, I was kinda curious like how that thing would behave. And so I made one to create posts with it on my little development site. And you could see I had a free form list and I wrote cat hat rat in it. And then I set it in my post creator to make it a category, to make it tags to see if that would work. And I also set it to be in the body. So it built me an unordered list out of it. And it did all that. So I was like, that's pretty damn cool. I can do all those things from that list without any problem. Yeah, that's interesting. And as Meredith was asking, so this really acts as a dynamic based on user submission. So a dynamic list that can be created based on user submission. Does that kind of summarize it well? Yes, and it just gives you, it gives you something like, so you might do like, if we were to do a recipe, I'm always kind of, you're at this line of like, how much structure do I give somebody without making it so that it sucks, right? So can I give them guidance? Maybe I'm like, hey, for this, list the dairy ingredients here, the meat ingredients here, the vegetables here. And then I can use those chunks in different ways when I display the stuff. And since it's already building a list for me, super nice, then I don't have to think about like how I'm gonna structure that data. So it's just looking at like, what's the experience for the user to fill it in? What am I trying to get out of them? What level of structure do I need to provide? What level of freedom do I need to provide? I like that. And I would ask this. So we have about four minutes left, five minutes left. And one of the things that would be interesting is, based on your showing off the very basics of gravity forms and building a basic tool, what would be a good exercise between now and next Thursday when we need again to kind of build on our establishing knowledge for folks to do and share. So maybe other people can build the basic form. I guess hot dogs might be a thing or by whatever thing. Like it might be interesting maybe to hear from other folks in Discord or even from you, like what would be a good quote unquote assignment to get people playing with gravity forms, familiar with some of the basics and then get us ready for next Thursday when we build on what we've already kind of, not only learned, but then used because you're only gonna really learn it and figure it out by playing with it and doing that. So that's crucial here and we hope that you do and share. So ideas there. So I think my suggestion would be, look for an information gathering piece. And it can either be down the line, you want something to happen with that information, but like work through something that has a little bit of sustenance, a little bit of something that's a little chewy that you can start looking at. How little information can you require them to fill out? How kind of fun and visual can you make this feel for them? I do wanna point out two things super quick and I hate myself for it. One is under settings and confirmations. This is the, yeah. I'm gonna share your screen again, give me one second. Here we go, you're good. This is the step that shows up after the form gets submitted. This is kind of key, mess around with this. You can show text, you could point them to a page, you could redirect to any URL in the world. Pretty cool. And then I wanna point out notifications. This is where you can send emails based on form submissions and it's gonna have a default one. My caution here, my pro tip is make sure you make the details here, good details. Like if you have a bunch of things that end up being sent to you that say new submission from some form title, you'll go insane. I used to get these emails all the time, I had no idea where they were coming from. So adding the URL where it's coming from here or it down here in the message, essential and key. But you can do all sorts of stuff with this. You can make multiple ones. That's another great thing to play around with. So in addition to setting up a form and kind of finding a problem to solve, think through like how this stuff is gonna go someplace and what you're gonna do with it. Yeah, I really do love that advice. And I think one of the things that Ed Beck was sharing in Discord and definitely go back and look at it is creating a very simple example of a form to collect that. I know Ben Rimes had mentioned this and a couple of folks who were interested in gravity forms, like is there a very manual, maybe even paper-based process of collecting information that you can kind of think through a form to help you just get a simple idea of how to collect that information. And I hope over the course of the next several weeks you get a sense of how to make that a more dynamic and even akin to an application-based input. So where you're not only inputting that data and getting an email, oh, here's the data it's going in a spreadsheet, it's actually maybe a dynamic database that's filterable and more. So I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but like this is the beginning of that. I'm personally gonna build a personal library of stuff and I will be talking with Ed who commented in Discord about what that looks like, but think through a project that maybe you wanna, I have a lot of VHS to catalog, I gotta deal with that. So like, is there a problem you wanna solve so this will be a real world thing? That would be super interesting to think about. So we are at the hour. I do wanna thank you, Tom, for taking time and really your pacing was brilliant. I was able to not only produce this if we can call it that, but follow along and really see everything you did. So thank you so much for this and we look forward to everyone out there who has been following along in Discord and been doing this. We look forward to what you build over the next seven days and then coming back and actually sharing that, you can jump into this to the stream, we can do some of that and then we'll go over some more advanced elements and then keep it going for another three to four weeks to get this stuff kind of really makes sense, I think is the key to this. So thanks again, Tom. Hey, my pleasure, thank y'all. All right.