[SOLVED] Need Help Styling the Gravity Form plugin
 

We've been using the CForms II plugin to gather info from our site's visitors. CForms II is powerful and flexible but its user interface ( what we see in the WP Dashboard ) is MISERABLE! ...so much so that I DREAD going in to make any changes or implementing updates.

I'm discovering that he "paid" plugin Gravity Form has an absolutely wonderful interface -- it's actually FUN to go in to change a function, add a new line/field, etc!!

When I asked the Gravity folks about how to "style" the generated forms to "best blend" with the look and feel of my site I received the following:
BTW: Gravity offers "expedited support" to their customers (ie. people who've paid for their plugin) so my info request was "sent" via a plain "Contact Us" form. Despite that, Carl Hancock's response to me via email was very speedy! Full marks for having good "not-yet-a-customer-service"

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 9:14:29 AM
From: Carl Hancock <carl@rocketgenius.com>

Hello Jim,

Right now in order to do that what you would want to do is copy the CSS from the plugin's stylesheet and place it in your themes CSS file and then turn off the CSS output in the plugin so that only the CSS from your theme is used.

Then you can update and change the CSS all you want without touching the source CSS file.

By keeping the changes with your theme rather than the plugin, it prevents any issues of your changes being overwritten by future upgrades to the plugin. It also means less CSS files being called on the page which is good for performance.

Thanks! Carl Hancock

My question: How do I translate "...copy the CSS from the plugin's stylesheet and place it in your themes CSS file and then turn off the CSS output in the plugin so that only the CSS from your theme is used." into Atahualpa Options?

Jim

You could just copy the css and put it in CSS Inserts
Can't tell you how to shut off their css since I don't have the plugin.

You will still have to tweek that css to make it look the way you want it to.

Update: I went ahead and purchased a license for the Gravity Forms plugin. To date I haven't done anything very exciting with it, but I can tell you that setting up my "get on our email list" form http://www.hatchtown.com/tools went so much more quickly than with the more basic plugin I'd used previously. And the resulting form looks and works better!

I'm happy to report that the GF customer service / support just keeps getting better. I had asked on their Forum whether Gravity Forms could do something. Before I could even log back in, they'd posted:

1) no Gravity Forms does not yet do that

...and then, a few minutes later

2) but we figured out how you can do it so we've just posted a blogpost with the necessary code and how to do it

AND, when I was too ignorant (not enough of a php geek) to figure out where in the Atahualpa ATO I'd insert their hack, one of their Forum admins went in and did it for me.

mini rant: I LOVE free and open source software, but when my livelihood (and sanity!) are at stake I welcome the chance to pay/contribute some $$$ to be rewarded with quality products and some support.