For the last 2+ years, I’ve been trying to do some good in the WordPress Community. I’ve spoken at a few WordCamps, I’ve helped organize a few WordCamps, I’ve spoken at the Las Vegas WordPress Meet Up Group, I’ve helped members of the Las Vegas WordPress Meet Up Group and donated an entire 72 hours to Vegas Give Camp. I’m an admin on the Advanced WordPress Group on Facebook and I’m speaking this year at 2015 WordCamp San Diego. All in all, I’ve been busy. I’ve got the WordPress Support Company moving in the right direction again after I was notified that my partner would be leaving the company to pursue an acting career. It’s funny because we call him Adam West all the time.
What is one supposed to do when you have a little bit of time on your hands? The truth is that I do not have extra time on my hands. I stopped logging into Facebook, worrying about Facebook and Facebooking in general for an entire month. So I found myself with more free time that I could imagine having. So I decided to make a plugin. Wanna see my face while I was trying to think of a plugin Idea?
To Enqueue or not To Enqueue.
OK, that was a bit lame. If you’ve ever worked with WordPress themes or plugins, you probably have heard of WP-Enqueue. If you haven’t, it basically adds a script or a style sheet to the header / footer of your WordPress site. It helps a lot when you have clients who change themes like wildfires. So I was thinking about WP-Enqueue for a while. I’ve been building this internal site for a mortgage company and that’s all I’ve been doing.
Two nights ago, I was thinking to myself. Mostly because I was alone with my thoughts. I wished that there was a plugin that you could install that has pre-defined Gravity Form class names in it. That way I can just drop a class name into a form and WHAMMO! The gravity form is stylized. I posted it to Twitter and someone left me a comment on Facebook. Since I’m boycotting Facebook for a month or more, I was able to see the comment via Gmail. I love technology sometimes. Megan Gray commented on the post “Take my money”. First of all, it was not the comment i was expecting. Nor was it the person I thought would leave such a comment. Comment. Ok, I just wanted to say Comment again. I’m super glad that she did though. I came to work with my keyboard in hand, and wrote a simple enqueue script. Dropped it into a plugin, and named it Gravity Styles. 2 days later, here I am.
The Plugin
Like I said earlier, I simply wrote a bunch of pre-defined class names into a style sheet and loaded it into the header by WP-Enqueue. Then I loaded a gravity forms with all the fixin’s. Meaning that I loaded a gravity form with every possible field and option checked. That way I wouldn’t miss a thing. Dropped some css into the style sheet and BAM. There it was. A Plugin was born. I just needed to load it to Github and I’m done. Go check out the site GravityStyles.com and see some of the demo’s. I’m adding new classes for the next week straight, and then I’ll work on updating the plugin in WordPress via Github.
For now, the plugin is “As Is” in Beta Testing. Feel free to download it and try it yourself. Nothing’s stopping you. Even if you don’t have a WordPress Blog. Just download it.
What are my intentions for the plugin you ask?
My intentions for the plugin are simple. Provide some styles that hit a wide variety of potential users. It’s going to be a free plugin for a while. Until the downloads go through the roof. Then maybe I’ll work on a Pro Version. I also want to have some friends of mine style up some forms for me. Maybe in their company colors. Maybe they style it to look like the Vegas Sign? Who knows. I just wanted to help the Users who may be new to WordPress, style their forms with out having to go the same route I did. You know?