 Good afternoon everyone. All right. Can everybody hear me in the back? No? Okay All right, I'll try to yell as loud as I can here without losing my voice All right. I am Naomi C. Bush If you are here for a the non coders secret weapon to building Custom applications, then you're in the right place and before we start if you could just do me a favor and If you're going to chat about the talk can you use Twitter and if you want me to see it just tag me Here's my Username here for Twitter. It's at Naomi C. Bush So I'm getting started So last October there was an event here in Atlanta called 48 and 48 And what that meant was just that over 100 volunteers. We all got together For 48 hours to build 48 websites for 48 nonprofits so that's where the name came from and The organizers gave the plug-in team that I was a part of a list of functionality for the websites All right, and our job was to find the plugins that they were going to use or Preferably and this came down from the organizers. They wanted us to build it build them ourselves Yeah, that was funny and we had four hours before the event Started to give our recommendations. So we set about just searching for Plugins to do all sorts of things But the main thing that we needed to do was we needed to have a charity water Type of fundraising system where a nonprofit could enlist their supporters to fundraise for them Who here is familiar with charity water in their campaigns? Okay, so if you're familiar with it someone creates a personal campaign Maybe for their birthday or some other type of event and then ask people to donate to charity water through their personal campaign page Here's an example here. I don't know if you've heard of this story here of Rachel She was raising money for her ninth birthday, and I believe she had a terminal illness and it kind of went viral And so it's been very successful for charity water so we looked at crowdfunding plugins and donation plugins and fundraising plugins and You know by the end it was like okay. Surely we're just gonna have to build this right well The more I looked at it the more I realized that we could actually do this with Gravity forms with no custom coding Okay, and you may say what? Nah, you're kidding But we did it and we did it in an hour because that's all the time that we had left So with nothing but gravity forms and a few add-ons we successfully replicated the charity water fundraising system Okay, and so here on the left You'll see the charity water create a campaign page and on the right. You'll see our very crude gravity form okay, and You can see it's not styled. It's not pretty, but it works. All right. It has the same Functionality there and as you know with forms, you know, it's styling is you know after the fact and So we enabled nonprofits to accept both one time and recurring donations All right, they could either choose from a predefined amount or they could set their own amounts The donors could log in and cancel or update their recurring donation See a list of all their donation history do one click giving All right because their credit card information was saved for ease of use They could also give in whatever currencies they wanted and the nonprofits could now Significantly increase their fundraising reach by enabling supporters and donors to create their own personal fundraising campaigns All right and basically use their network to raise funds on their behalf So we actually did a whole case study on it and since we don't have time here today if you're interested For the duration of this talk I actually have a tweet at the top of my Twitter account and it just lets you know where to go to find the slides Okay, as well as I'll have some bonuses at the end including the full case study that we did But basically it was an incredible and an exhilarating experience And when I saw what we were able to build in record time All right using nothing but a form builder. I knew that I wanted to share it specifically here at WordCamp Atlanta So it all started out six years ago when I purchased a plug-in that I did not know Would change my life? Okay When I say change my life, I mean like Vitamix change my life Okay, and if you've seen the very first time that I that I've spoke here at WordCamp Then you'll know why I mentioned the Vitamix. All right, so the first client project that I use this plug-in on For more than a contact form was a membership Organization that wanted to process their payments online Well, don't you need a membership plug-in for that or an e-commerce plug-in? Well, no Okay, we used a simple form that asked for a credit card number And when they paid then a new user was created on our wordpress site They were able to log in and update their profile and do all sorts of other things with just my form builder Okay, so the first thing that I use the form builder for other than a contact form was a simple tiered membership system Okay, and that was cool But you know, I'd still only scratch the surface just a bit above the surface Okay, and the more that I saw how other people were using a form builder the more I realized oh my gosh, you know a form builder can basically do anything and I can use it to create exactly what I want. However, I want it Okay, but even though most people already have one they never even consider a form builder for their projects because they think well It's only for contact forms or if the client client doesn't explicitly say, you know, I need to build a form or If you've received misinformation like you know your form builder is great, but it can't do that Okay, and I say to that. Well, if your form builder can do all of this All right, not counting all of the other 100 plus add-ons Maybe just maybe it can do that other thing that you're thinking of Okay, because that's a whole lot more than contact forms, huh? And so I would say just because you or the person that you're talking to doesn't know how to do it Doesn't mean that it can't be done. Okay, and this is something that I You know if you've seen me on any forums you've probably seen me in there Passionately saying just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean that it can't be done your form builder can do this All right And after all, you know, we did build a whole fundraising system in an hour Okay, and 99% of the time I see someone saying that a form builder can't do something. They just don't know how to do it okay So what is it about a form builder? Okay? Why am I always talking about a form builder? I'm surprised some of you came back. Okay, because I'm always talking about a form builder Well, if you think about it, what does a form builder do? Okay? All it does is receive input and then do something with or process that input Okay, and so essentially what it is is it's almost like a black box Give me all your info and I will take and do something with that info Okay, and so a contact form is an easy example. Give me your name email address in a message and that's the input and Then I will your I'll email your message to you I'll save your message to your WordPress database Your name and your email address will be added to my mailing list or to my CRM or to my support desk And you can receive a text message Okay, so that's just a simple way of Given some input. Here are some of the things that I can do with that input. Okay Now that's a very simple example But if you notice with a form builder, there are actually no limits on what type of input you can receive and no limits on what you can do with that information if you see these fields here from a From a standard form builder, you see something like single line text paragraph text drop down I mean, there's no assumptions made about that information All right There's so much more that you can do with that other than just a name and an email address and a message field and Setting an email and saving the information to WordPress isn't the only thing that you can do with that information All right, I could just as easily have said give me your name Email address your business name your business address your business type your taxpayer ID and your signature and I will Generate a W9 for you in PDF format and email it to you and to your HR contact okay, or Give me a name an email a date a time a location a contact number And then I'll add your event to our public calendar I'll email you a confirmation and I'll display it as a pin on our event map here How about give me a name an email address a job description and I'll add it to our list of searchable jobs I'll give you a link for you to go back and update the job Others can apply to that job. I'll email you their application and Add it to your Google spreadsheet of applicants and then you can mark the job as fulfilled or closed when you're done Okay So as you can see we're just we're building here. Okay, there's so much that you can do how about this one? Okay, give me your name Your email address a credit card number and then what I'll do is I'll charge you a monthly subscription Which will go directly into my bank account? All right I'll send you a PDF invoice every month I'll create a new user for you on my WordPress site. I'll save your credit card So then when you come back to my website and make another purchase All of your information is pre-filled and you can use your say you can use your save credit card You can cancel or change your subscription at any time And you'll get special members only pricing by default without any special coupons Okay Or as in our earlier example You can give me your name email address Campaign name your goal type image description and will allow people to come and donate under your campaign and show you How much your campaign has raised? Okay So as you can see we name just a few use cases that you can probably think of other plugins Other than a form builder that you can use for those So you might say well, oh, I need a mailing list plug-in or I need a membership plug-in Or I need an event calendar plug-in or surely I'll need a developer to do this for me But we just did all of these things with just a form builder Okay, without any coding no coding required And how we did this is because by design a form builder is what I call non-opinionated and open-ended It simply receives input Any input and processes that input with no assumptions? And so what do I mean by non-opinionated and no assumptions? Well, let's say we have an e-commerce plug-in a Common request that you'll see is how do I add my own fields to the checkout form so that I can collect custom information All right, or how do I collect custom information for a particular product? And why do you commonly see this request? Well because the e-commerce plug-in has an opinion About what information a standard checkout page should collect? And what it'll do is it will create the checkout page to only collect that information And it can't possibly predict all of the information that you might want to collect for a product However a form builder doesn't take an opinion Okay, and it actually can't take an opinion because it has no idea what information you're going to ask it to collect Okay, and so this simple functionality of receiving input and processing that input is What makes a form builder an extremely flexible asset and what I call your secret weapon? All right for building exactly what you need It's kind of like Legos. All right where you can become a master builder Choosing just the pieces that you need to build whatever it is that you can think of and even whatever curveball your client may throw at you All right, so who here has had the problem of needing to do something complicated All right All right, and so you ask around for plug-in recommendations. I know some of you have I've I've seen it There's like an Atlanta WordPress group. I think on Google Google plus and I see people do you know of a plug-in that can do this or do you know of a plug-in that can do that? All right, and so you receive a few that sort of do what you want, but not quite the way you want it All right, and so you settle all right, and you force fit the plug-in into your situation Or you conclude that it has to be custom-built and so you start the whole process of hiring a developer All right that fits in the budget which brings a whole different set of challenges if you've ever Tried to hire a developer before okay And so what about the opposite where you just need to do something simple like take a payment? And so you think that your only option is to turn to a huge e-commerce plug-in with a whole shopping cart and checkout system If only Only if only there was a better way And so my goal here today Was to show you that if you need a solution for something custom Okay, that isn't readily supported by an off-the-shelf application All right, or you just don't need a big application and that custom thing that you need to do Has something to do with receiving input and then processing that input a form-builder could Be just what the doctor ordered all right It's a great candidate for your job because it's a good middle ground between Custom development and then a plug-in that does exactly what I want And if you think you need to hire a developer well consider hiring your form-builder instead All right ask can my form-builder do this and if it can't do it readily Can I hire someone to build just a customization for the form-builder instead of building something completely from scratch? Okay, let me give you another example here. All right, let's take our event calendar example and add a few more pieces All right, so if you remember from our event calendar example You gave some information for an event. It was added to our list of events displayed, you know as a map on our Displayed as a pin on our map and so now let's allow people to RSVP to your event All right, and then let's send them an email confirmation and Send you an email notification and let you download a list of all the attendees for the event This is a form. I actually built. It's been up and running for about three years now And now let's add a few more let's allow people to pay for the event and We'll charge their credit card Send them a receipt and then send them a PDF ticket with a scannable barcode for easy entrance Okay, wait a minute. Did we just build the event bright? Here's another example. I had a client who they had basically tried all of the Hosted payment systems. I don't know if you're familiar with gum road Moon clerk What's another one? I can't remember the name of the other one But those are all these you know nice hosting systems for payment, but he had a really complicated billing setup Okay, where first of all he had three packages okay, and For current customers, they needed to receive a discount on those three packages and They're needed to be early bird discounts for those packages So in essence there were so many different prices and he had coupons All right, and so none of the hosted systems could handle this and so what we did was We did it with gravity forms where if you were a current customer Well first if it was before a certain date then the price of the product was a you know You had a certain price for that product then if you were a customer You received another discount on that product and then after automatically after that early bird date was over the price automatically changed over to the regular price and We were able to do coupons with both PayPal and strike. So he had two different payment methods on there so that's just an example of Some of the complicated custom things that you can do All right, and so I know that there's normally a lot of questions here So what I've done is for some of the things that I've talked about here What I've done is I've actually created a a Package of bonuses all right where all of the off-the-shelf tools that I used in those examples The case study for the fundraising system the case study for the billing system that I just mentioned as well as the slides with all of my Speaker notes and for some of those plugins They are paid plugins and some of the authors have generously decided to give discounts Very if anyone is interested. So I've put that all together for you. And again, I have that tweet On my Twitter account It's right at the top and it just gives you the link to where you can go and all of that stuff will be sent right to you Okay And also I'm happy to answer any Afterwards any you know can my form builder do this or is this a good job for my form builder? I'm happy to answer any of those type of questions, but now I'm gonna go ahead and answer any questions here in the room Okay, thank you. I think you had your hand on the rear curve and Membership can the form send your reminder? It can send you a reminder when the payments are due the particular solution that I'm referring to it it sends you a Notification if your payment failed and It'll give you the link for you to go back in and say okay Hey update your your billing information And it will it will retry I think about three times So it'll send you that notification three times and then it'll cancel your subscription And it does that automatically and that's actually a function of the payment processor that you're using So if you're using stripe it'll do that for you And then what it'll do is it will send you a If your payment was successful, then it'll send you a notification Okay, yes I Know everything that I've mentioned here today is no coding So if you remember this slide here what this is Is these are actually a list of add-ons? So there are just additional plugins that you plug into your form builder and it will add the functionality that you're looking for so For example this PDF one there's there's an add-on that will generate PDFs There's an add-on that will do all of those things Who here is familiar with zappier? Okay, zappier And so if there's not an explicit add-on for something that you want to do I think zappier connects with like Zappier like happier Zappier actually looked it up to learn how to pronounce it so Yes These are all this particular forms just because one of the other form builders their website was down And so I couldn't get a screenshot, but Any of the professional form builders have have these add-ons? Okay. Yes You know it just it depends on what what is going to do the job and what you're comfortable with Me personally because like I said, I've got gravity forms like six years ago when it was the only one So that's what I'm comfortable in but any of the solutions are are fine Like I said, I think the top three are gravity forms ninja forms and formidable as far as a professional solution Okay, so if you're using something like contact form seven, you know that you won't get as much okay You had your hand up Some of the solutions So that's that's a good question those solutions are for creating custom content types Okay, you can create forms with those solutions, but therefore creating custom content types And so what you'll find is that and I actually built it Help build the user interface, but there's a gravity forms add-on for pods Okay, so that you can from your front-end forms you can then send information and create pods Okay, you For the plug in itself. I mean yeah, yes, and also there is an encryption add-on So if you're doing things like you need to be HIPAA compliant and You taking financial data if you're taking financial data first of all The credit card information credit card numbers will be encrypted So that's one thing and then there is an encryption plug-in that will encrypt all the data that you take in and then there's another Add-on that will actually redact some of the data And I know that because I built it because some client asked me for it because they needed you know to redact some data So oh absolutely you should use a secure certificate Yes, sir Gravity PDF and that's just for gravity forms Ninja Forms has a PDF one Formidable has a PDF in integration as well. Yes, sir If Conditional logic that is That is one of the default That's the default functionality for a form builder So you can have sections multiple pages if a person says this then show them this section If they don't do this then you know show them another section So Yes, sir Okay Yes, with with the PDFs you can attach those to the notification. That's a default functionality of that PDF integration The emails are the notifications and gravity forms images and Yes, you can you can attach the images to the notification. There's a Not the actual image. I see what you're saying Well, the PDFs the actual PDF is attached for the images. I don't think I've ever tried to attach the actual image how you could do it though is Since the notifications allow HTML Then what you could do is you could put it in the body of the of the email just use the image tag And that will have it, you know kind of embedded in there. Does that make sense? No So, you know how if you have a web page All right, and you want to include an image on that web page then you just use the HTML image tag Okay, okay, so there is an integration called for gravity form specifically is called gravity forms notification Attachments I would check that out Gravity forms notification attachments And that's that's on the WordPress repository anyone else Yes, sir Yeah, so I think it's just like types and views and You know where you can kind of build these Custom con, you know custom application type things the reason why I'm doing this on a form builder is because everyone is more likely to have a form builder And so it's an opportunity for you to use what you already have and it's very powerful and very stable Anyone else? Yes Yes, yes, that is a gravity form. Yes Yes, it is a gravity form. Okay. Well, thank you so much. I'll stick around for a little bit