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General Discussion

Randy Wang
Randy Wang
9,291 Points
Posted by Randy Wang
Randy Wang
9,291 Points

Using Gravity Forms to build crowd-funding site

Hey Zac, thanks for the awesome tutorials on Treehouse!

I'm at the point where I'm considering purchasing the Developer License for Gravity Forms. It sounds amazing. Any chance you can take 5 minutes to give me some advice before I drop $200 on a plugin?

The site that I'm hoping to build is essentially a crowd-funding site (most content will be user generated) with the following desired features:

  1. Anyone can register to become user on the site
  2. Users can login and see their profile and account information
  3. Users can create projects via a new project form that will automatically be stored in the database and displayed on the front-end of the site.
  4. Users can pay to fund projects using Paypal.

Will Gravity Forms be enough to handle all of my form related needs? If not, what additional plugins would you anticipate that I would need?

Thanks!

3 Answers

Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points
Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points

The basic answer is yes. The developer version of Gravity forms can handle the registration, logging in, and paypal. The creation of the new project will not be automatic with gravity forms but Gravity forms are certaintly easily extended to direct the info to your own custom php which will in turn do the project creation from the forms data.

Zac Gordon
STAFF
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Zac Gordon
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher

To follow along with your list:

  1. User registration is native WP functionality
  2. Ability to login and edit profile is also something native and can easily be extended with user related plugins
  3. Gravity forms would let users submit new projects via the front-end of the site, and you could set it so people can publish new projects without any moderation from an admin. You could also require an admin to approve new submissions
  4. Gravity Forms could be used for submitting payments, but I would not recommend it. The problem with this approach is that you would manually have to track how much money went to each order externally or with a whole lot of complicated custom coding.

Two other suggestions:

  1. Check out some of these WP plugins that were designed specifically for building crowdfunding sites with WordPress: http://www.wpmayor.com/best-crowdfunding-solutions-for-wordpress/. In the future, always search for whatever it is you're trying to build plus WordPress Plugins or WordPress Themes at the end, you're be surprised sometimes what you find ;)
  2. Gravity Forms has several tiers of pricing so you don't have to drop $200, hopefully you saw that and just decided if you were to buy it you would go for the $200 plan over the other more affordable options for one off projects.
Keith Klingen
Keith Klingen
9,031 Points
Keith Klingen
Keith Klingen
9,031 Points

Randy - did you succeed at getting this built? I am looking at building something very similar, just utilizing Stripe instead. Would love to glean any advice/input you might have.