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Finally. Custom WordPress Forms Made Easy!

It is one of the most important elements in your website… your contact form. So why is it that WordPress doesn’t have a built-in feature that enables you to create custom contact forms? Thankfully, the creative folks at RocketGenius have stepped up to the plate and filled this much-needed void with an amazing new plugin called Gravity Forms.

Over the past several years, I’ve tried just about every contact form plugin out there, including cforms and Contact Form 7. I was frustrated with the apparent trade-off between functionality and usability. It seemed that the more flexible the plugin, the more confusing the UI. This is where Gravity Forms simply blows away the competition! They’ve managed to create an incredibly flexible plugin, adding innovative features while still maintaining a drop-dead-simple AJAX interface that feels more like a desktop app than a web plugin.

In fact, this plugin is so good, you’ll wonder why it doesn’t just come standard in WordPress! (hint, hint)

Just a few of the innovative features…

1. Seamless Integration with WordPress 2.8+ – If you know how to use WordPress 2.8, you know how to use Gravity Forms. From the colors to the way it functions, Gravity Forms looks and feels like a part of WordPress.
2. Visually Create Forms with Our Sleek Editor – The visual form editor enables people with no HTML skills to create complex forms in minutes. Just add fields, choose field options, and drag them into the desired position.
3. Prevent Spam with Built-In reCAPTCHA Protection – The reCAPTCHA field will shield you from spam by preventing from submissions from automated scripts. You will also be helping in digitizing books for online use.
4. Allow Users to Automatically Create a Post – Let your users help with data entry. When added to a form, our Post Fields create a post when the form is submitted. Great for user submitted stories, job postings, directories, etc.
5. Manage Entries from the WordPress Admin Panel – Search, edit, delete and keep track of all entries from the Entries page in your WordPress administration panel.
6. Easily Export Form Entry Data to CSV Format – Need your entry data for other applications? Easily export all or part of your entries to CSV. Our export tool makes it a breeze to export only the fields that are needed.

Gravity Forms also sends automatic emails to users in response to a submission, enabling you to create professional and personalized messages.

If you’ve been searching for a simple way to create custom forms for your WordPress pages and posts, look no further than this plugin! Honestly, Gravity Forms is unrivaled when it comes to creating custom forms for WordPress.

Ready to learn more? Why not jump over to their site and take a look at the video tour?

But wait! There’s more…

Thanks to the good folks over at WooThemes, you can use the coupon code: WOOFORM20 when you purchase Gravity Forms, and they’ll give you a nice 20% discount. So what you waiting for? Go check it out already!

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT GRAVITY FORMS FOR YOURSELF!

Measuring the Success of Twitter for Your Business

More and more businesses are recognizing the potential of social media for building their brand and connecting with an even broader audience. There are dozens of articles written every day about how to use Twitter for business, but it seems there are a growing number of articles that claim to expose the “fundamental flaws of Twitter,” or proudly announce the “10 reasons Twitter will fail.”

During a recent conversation with one of my clients, he raised these concerns and asked me if I thought Twitter was just an “overhyped trend” that would soon disappear. “Why is it,” he asked, “that so many businesses have had poor results using Twitter to promote their products or services?”

In my opinion, the majority of these negative articles reveal either poor practices, a gross misunderstanding of the purpose of social media, or both. One may as well write an article about the fundamental flaws of a hammer when used to brush one’s hair. You’re either using the tool incorrectly, or for the wrong purpose! Read the rest of this article »

Is $0.00 the Future of Business?

“Information wants to be free.”

Those now-famous words were first spoken by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, in the following context:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

Or, as Chris Anderson puts it in his latest book, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business…

“Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive.”

Such is the premise of the compelling new book by Wired Magazine’s Editor In Chief, Chris Anderson. But tell that to the poor CIO who just shelled out six figures to buy another rack of servers. And what of the notion that “anybody can make money on the web?”

Today, the underlying technologies that power the Web are fast becoming too cheap to meter. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero. Read the rest of this article »

What’s New in WordPress 2.8?

The hard-working WordPress team has just released the latest upgrade to their increasingly-popular content management system. WordPress 2.8 “Baker” has been named after noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. The release is being called a “fit and finish” release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. They’ve also fixed over 790 bugs.

Visually, 2.8 looks and feels a lot like 2.7, with just minor tweaks here and there. But once you dig in, you’ll begin to notice more changes.

Major changes and rewrites under the hood to the styles and scripting have made 2.8 noticeably faster. You should notice significantly better response times while navigating the admin area.

The built-in plugin updater has been such a success, they’ve now added the same functionality to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. There is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.

If you were ever frustrated with sidebar widgets before, this release should offer great relief. The widgets interface has been completely redesigned, enabling you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. (Yeah!)

Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. If you have a wide monitor, you can choose to display one, two, three, or four columns of widgets in your dashboard, instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.

Check out the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the WordPress Codex. The list is exhausting!

Overall, you should be able to upgrade to version 2.8 without major disruptions to your current theme, but you’ll enjoy a much faster, and even more flexible interface than ever before. Keep up the great work, WordPress!

50 Great Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

Twitter is fast becoming one of the most important tools for business that we never knew we always wanted. Chris Brogan has compiled a great list of 50 thoughts for people looking to use Twitter for business:

http://tinyurl.com/5u75pe