It is relatively easy to add forms to any page, post, or widget on our site. You can set up notifications to receive an email when someone submits the form, and you can also export all entries as an Excel document.
Once you log into the back end of your site, go to "Forms" and click "Add new."
A. Hover over form title and click "Edit" to change the title and description.
B. Select the type of field you want to add to your form. For example, click "Radio Buttons," and the default settings will be added to your form.
C. Customize the field options — again, hover over the new field and click "edit," then type in the choices you'd like to add. Check "required" if that field is mandatory. For a drop-down list, you may want to add "Select One" as the first option.
Repeat B & C until you have all the fields you need. You can drag and drop the fields to rearrange the order at any point.
The "Advanced Fields" contain pre-formatted address, email, and other fields, so you don't have to create those yourself. The "Post Fields" connect to posts in your site; if you include "title" and "body," for example, when someone submits the form, a draft will appear in your list of posts. All you would have to do is copy edit the post and publish it with the appropriate category. This is great for soliciting alumni stories or news items from your visitors.
If you have a large list of custom choices that you will need to use in many forms, you may want to save custom items under "Bulk Add / Predefined Choices" so that you can retrieve this list on future forms.
Under the "Advanced" tab, you can enable conditional logic if you want the form to change based on what people fill out.
Once you finish setting up the form, click "Save form." You can preview the form, or go ahead and set up email notifications.
When you set up email notifications, you are basically building the email that you will receive when someone submits the form. Enter your email address, the "from name" that will display on the email, and so on. You can leave most of these settings to the default value.
You can also tell the form to email different addresses depending on what people submitted. Use "Routing" to set this up. You can set up multiple routing rules for as many fields as you like.
Now that your form is built, create a new page or post (or open the existing page/post where you want the form to appear). Click "Add Form," then select the form that you just built and insert the form onto the page.
Before you publish the page, all you will see in the content editor is something like this:
[gravityform id="3" name="Website feedback"]
That is a shortcode that will pull up the entire form and embed it onto that page. Go ahead and publish (or update) the page, click "view page," and see your beautiful new form ready for submissions! You should fill it out yourself to make sure everything works accordingly.
If you'd like a form in a widget, use the "Form" widget. Keep in mind that long forms will not work well in the widget area; this would be best for a short "contact us" form or something similar.
If you set up email notifications, you will receive an email every time someone submits the form. If you'd rather see all the entries at once, go back to "Forms" and select "Entries."
You can also click "Import/Export" to export a .csv (Excel) file of the entries received. You can select which fields to export, and narrow down submissions by date.
If you need to edit your form after you've already added it to a page, all you need to do is go back to "Forms" and edit the form there (see step 1), then click Save. The form on the page will automatically update.