Watch Kori Ashton from WebTegrity teach you how to turn entries from your #WordPress forms into a PDF file to easily download. This free plugin allows you to use Gravity Forms and have all entries be PDF formatted. See more options below.
Full Audio Transcript
Hey, everybody, it’s that time again. Another WordPress Wednesday. Thanks for joining me here on my YouTube channel and if you love all things WordPress, be sure to search through our whole library. I’ve got over 200 videos here on our channel that are going to help you improve your online marketing, specifically in the world of WordPress.
Alright, today I’m doing another video on Gravity Forms. If you watch my channel, you know I have an entire playlist dedicated to this incredible premium plugin. I call it a premium plugin because you have to pay for it, but the add-on that I’ve found today is in the budget of free. And if you follow my channel you know I love the budget of free. So, let’s look at how to create a form where, when somebody types in an entry it can automatically turn it into a PDF file for them to download or for your team to get, as well. It’s super crazy cool. I’m gonna actually show you what plugin it is, as well as show you how to set it all up. Again, on the budget of free. Let’s do this. I’m talking about the premium plugin called Gravity Forms.
You do have to purchase a license for this. If you’re kind to me, I’d appreciate you using my affiliate link, that’s in the description box below, but you don’t have to. I just want to show you how cool this is. We highly recommend the business license at $99 a year. You get a lot more add-ons, plus you can put it on a couple different websites. I say it’s per year because you definitely want to have the support and updates, every single year.
You certainly want to look at understanding that in your budget. But, you’re gonna be blown away by how cool this is. Let’s get into it. The add-on that I’m going to talk to you about is called Gravity PDF and what I want you also to do, if this video is a little bit older and you’re looking at this, I want you to be sure it’s been tested with your current version. We’re running 4.8, so it’s okay for our current version. It’s been updated recently. Again, I want you to just to confirm that it’s been updated recently and make sure that the ratings are still really great as they are right now. Just extraordinary, extraordinary options and all for free. I’m gonna show you…I’ve already created a form using Gravity Forms on my website. I want you to see what these fields look like. I’m gonna show you now, how to get in here and basically add in this add-on for Gravity Forms and set it all up. So, you’re gonna go into your plugins and say “Add New” and of course, we’re talking about the WordPress dot org version of WordPress. You can’t do this, as of today, and do this at wordpress.com. So, you’re gonna do a search for “Gravity PDF” is what you’re looking for.
This plugin right here is the one that I’ve activated and it’s the one you want. You’re gonna click “Install Now” and then activate it. Once you’ve already done that, which I’ve already done. Once you go over to your FORMS section now. This is what’s cool about it, is every single form, if you wanted to, could have its own PDF. It doesn’t automatically apply to every single one of your forms, because you may not want your contact form to have the ability to be turned into a PDF, but we’ve got this here and if you go under settings, now you have an option for PDF. So, we want to create the template specifically for this form that we’ve created, Testing PDF Gravity Forms.
We’re gonna go into here now to the PDF section of this particular Gravity Form and we’re going to hit “Add New”. Now, all you have to do is fill in the blank here. So, this is for admin purposes only, so we’re “testing the meetup form”. Let’s just throw that little label in there. These are templates of how you want the PDF to ultimately look and you can play around with how you want the different default options that they have for you here, or if you need something even more advanced and really dynamic looking, one of the ways that this plugin developer has monetized this, is by creating premium templates.
Check this out. If you wanted to, you could click on this little link right here that says “go over to our theme shop”. You can also build your own, by the way, or hire them to build a custom one; but, here’s their template shop that has all sorts of really cool existing templates that will give you really amazing style for these PDF files. Invoicing, letters…really, really cool options. For a very, very minimal expense. Like these are 19 US dollars. That’s a pretty phenomenal buy. But, you don’t have to, because check out what we’re about to do for a budget of free. We’re gonna go ahead and set the rest of these options here.
So, if you want a notification, it gives you the ability to give it a custom file name. So, for your own filing purposes or for the individual. If it’s a receipt. So, we’re gonna say “meet up” and I actually want to do the person’s first name and then I’m gonna do their last name. This is based on the fields that are inside of the form, right? Cuz, I’ve got a first name option here and the last name. So, whatever they put in there dynamically will help us name this file. That’s so cool. We’re gonna go over to appearance now. They give you some different paper size options, which is crazy and amazing. They also allow it to be portrait or landscape. We’re gonna leave all of these to default for now, just for the purpose of this video to show you what it will look like. I’m gonna go to the template area. Again, unlimited options here. Do you wanna show the form title on it? Do you want to show a multiple page form that has different page breaks? You can put the different page names at the top of each individual page. Just phenomenal. If you have a section break. Really cool options here.
This developer definitely knows all the facets of Gravity Forms. One of the other cool things they give you here, totally for free, is the ability to throw in a custom header or footer. And you can even use a different header on the first page if you wanted to have some sort of a welcome message. Very cool. Let’s go ahead and add, just to who you what it could look like, we’re gonna throw in our logo for now. I’m gonna insert that into the post and just put my logo in the middle there, for the sake of now. Up at the very top, you have some advanced options. This is interesting, for security purposes for some PDFs. I would just pay attention to what these options could be. We’re just gonna say “Add PDF”. So basically what we’ve done is we’ve created a template of how that PDF is going to look. It has the brain thing on it now and it’s got the file name on it now. Now we’ve created the function, now we need to give the ability for someone to download it or get to that PDF. So, let’s show you how to do that. That’s the last step of this. It’s really kind of cool. This plugin now gives us a shortcode. So, we’re gonna grab this download shortcode option. I copied that onto my clipboard, right now.
I’m gonna go over to the confirmation section of this particular form and right now I’ve already given it a default message as we click edit here. It says, “Thank you. Please download the PDF as your receipt.” All I’m gonna do is paste in that shortcode that allows for the download option to happen. I’m gonna click “Save Confirmation”.
That simple, y’all. If I went too fast, I know I’m a southern girl. I talk pretty quickly, 411; but, I tell you what, pause and rewind me. Go through this step-by-step, it’s gonna work perfectly for you. So, let me show you the end result of what all this is going to look like. I’m gonna click REFRESH on the front side of this website. We’re gonna fill out the form really quickly, just so you can see what it will ultimately look like here. Our favorite food is pizza. We’re gonna donate a hundred bucks. Why not?
And these are just silly fields so you can see the different options that Gravity Forms has the ability to do for you. Kind of cool. We’re gonna give an age of 8 here. I’m gonna add another, just so you kind of see what the options are here. And let’s just say “4” and just kind of fill up the page. So you can see what that is going to look like. We’ll do this and we’re gonna give an email address in here and I’ll throw in a phone number in here. And then, of course, you can just “Testing all of the fields”. I want you to see now, as I click “submit”, now we’re gonna move over to the confirmation. It says “Thank You. Please download the PDF as your receipt.” Now, you see the link here for “Download PDF”. I’m gonna click to download. It’s gonna open right away and a PDF viewer for me. Look at this.
Here are all of our fields laid out beautifully. There’s our total. There’s our logo on there and I’m gonna move this down, so you can see. Look at the title up here. “Meet up Kori Ashton 2”. And that 2 is there because I had already done some testing previous to this.
How cool is that, you guys? It’s a PDF. It’s available now for the individual download. I’ll show you one last really cool feature of this. Inside the entries area now, inside this particular form…You know how you can always see the entries, but now we actually have an area that’s not just viewable to see all the different entries here, but now we can say “View PDF”. So your admin team can come in here and view that PDF or download that PDF, as well. It saves in your library. Incredible.
This is all for the budget of free. Isn’t this outstanding. Now dream big with what your different options are that could be for this use, as people fill out different forms. An application or maybe it’s an option to join an event and this is going to be the receipt.
Just endless opportunities. If you love this video be sure to comment in the thread below or give me a Twitter shout out. I’d love to hear from you. I will see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, everyone.
Buy Gravity Forms – (affiliate link- thank you 🙂
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