Summary
This article lists some of the key features you will most likely notice immediately when checking out the brand new Gravity Forms 2.7.
For an up-to-date list of all features, refer to the Gravity Forms official change log.
It is worth noting that a lot of the effort this release is under-the-hood, setting up frameworks and developer-facing improvements and changes that will reap benefits for customers and developers as we move forward.
Major Features
Setup Wizard
Gravity Forms will now guide you through the biggest steps that are required after installation, to quickly get your license key entered and activated, and lead you quickly into the form template browser.
More information: Gravity Forms Setup Wizard
Form Template Browser
Our pre-made form templates (as also provided on our website previously) are now offered directly within Gravity Forms when a new form creation process is initiated, allowing you to immediately start with a complete form just needing modifications for your particular requirements.
These templates have been updated and polished, and are supported by a help guide on our documentation site where needed.
If you have additional ideas for template ideas or feedback ops how to improve the base templates provided, you can make those suggestion on our product roadmap.
Gravity Forms Block Themes and Style Settings
With 2.7, we have completely reworked the frameworks and underpinnings that control form styling and appearance. If you are using the Gravity Forms Block to add Gravity Forms to your page or post, then when in the form editor, you will see a new Block setting that allows you to set the form theme to our new Orbital theme. Once Orbital is chosen, then you open up panels of settings that can be used to manipulate a number of appearance settings for your entire form. Refer to this document for more details.
For this initial beta, form settings must be set on a per form basis only, and are not persistent if you switch back to the default (pre-2.7) theme.
Form Appearance Settings have a limited selection of options for now. but this is an area we expect to be the focus of a lot of future improvements.
More information: Block Themes and Style Settings
Enhanced Honeypot Method and Settings
Our existing anti-spam honeypot measures have been enhanced with a new Javascript based method, and a new setting that allows you to now specify what you wish to happen to entries caught by the honeypot methods.
More information: Enhancements to the Spam Honeypot
Beta Change Log
2.7 Public Release (2023-01-25)
- Gravity Forms 2.7 has been released!
It will roll out to all customers with an active license via WordPress auto-update over the next few weeks.
2.7-RC-2 (2023-01-04)
- Added a button in the block editor to reset block styles to their default values.
- Added the gform_get_form_save_email_confirmation_filter filter for the confirmation message that appears when a user has entered their email on a form with save and continue enabled.
- Added the ability to copy and paste form styles using the Gravity Forms block editor.
- Added theme framework wrapper classes and data attributes to form confirmation wrappers.
- Added underlines to links in the Form Validation Summary for better accessibility.
- Updated form templates so they are optimized for accessibility.
- Updated the Theme Framework to use helper classes and mixins for disabled, focus, and error states.
- Updated the form editor save button style.
- Updated the form submit spinner to use new Theme Framework styles.
- Updated the image in the drag and drop instructions on an empty form.
- Updated the setup wizard to fit on narrower screens.
- Updated the setup wizard to redirect to the forms page on completion.
- Updated the template library thumbnails.
- Fixed a fatal error that can occur in some hosting environments with PHP 8+.
- Fixed an issue in the template library that caused some items to be mispositioned when using an RTL language.
- Fixed an issue which causes users with non-standard license types to receive improper access level messaging within the Template Library.
- Fixed an issue which causes Theme Layers to appear on the Logging page.
- Fixed broken styles in the e-commerce form template.
- Fixed an issue with Honeypot that prevents the Save and Continue functionality from working properly.
- API: Added a “block_editor” admin page type to allow add-ons to easily enqueue scripts and styles to the block editor via the scripts() and styles() methods.
2.7-RC-1
- Added security enhancements.
- Added a color contrast checker to the block editor to notify users when low contrast color combinations are used.
- Added performance improvements to form submissions for forms with lots of confirmations.
- Added performance improvements to form rendering.
- Added performance improvements to merge tag processing. Credit: The GravityKit team.
- Updated the Orbital theme’s primary blue color to #204ce5 to prevent a color contrast accessibility issue.
- Updated the date field enhanced UI to work with the theme framework.
- Updated the multi-file upload to work with the theme framework.
- Updated the select and multiselect fields’ enhanced UI to work with the theme framework.
- Updated setup wizard so that information entered by users is saved.
- Updated the form preview in the block editor to display the form if it has conditional logic.
- Updated form theme setting in the block editor so it will not display for forms in legacy mode.
- Updated form templates so that they are translatable.
- Updated form template library UI to be less confusing.
- Updated the form block to use modern React syntax and our existing build system.
- Fixed a JS warning that is displayed when selecting colors for the Orbital theme on the block editor.
- Fixed a performance issue where the gform_layout_editor script is being localised outside the editor for a form that doesn’t exist. Credit: The GravityKit team.
- Fixed an issue with the template library that prevents notifications and confirmations from being created.
- Fixed an issue with the embed form radio input alignment.
- Fixed an issue which causes legacy forms to display Orbital styles if they exist.
- Fixed an issue where the Gravity forms datepicker style is being applied outside of Gravity Forms.
2.7-beta-1
- Added form block styling options to allow users to easily customize the appearance of their forms.
- Added the Orbital form theme, built with the new theme framework.
- Added a form template library to make it easier to create common forms.
- Added an improved setup wizard for new installations.
- Added new Honeypot functionality to increase spam protection.
- Added a new Honeypot form setting to allow entries to be created and marked as spam when the Honeypot flags a form submission.
- Added the ability to upgrade a license from the settings page.
- Added accessibility improvements to the system report page.
- Added “Gravity Forms” to the title of admin pages to improve accessibility.
- Added an SVG delivery system for outputting multi-color SVGs consistently.
- Updated the Form, Entry and Feed List Table Markup to improve accessibility.
- Updated the default phone format option to be “International” instead of “US/Canada”.
- API: Added GFAPI::validate_field() to validate the value of a specific field.
- API: Added a new hook gform_entries_primary_column_filter to allow the entry list table’s first column to be filtered.
- API: Added a new filter gform_abort_submission_with_confirmation that can be used to abort form submission and display a confirmation.
- API: Added a new filter gform_search_criteria_export_entries to allow entries of different statuses (i.e. trash, abuse) to be exported.
- API: Added a new filter gform_get_form_save_confirmation_filter that allows the form save confirmation text to be programmatically changed before it is rendered to the page.