Gravity Flow – Open Beta

 

Back in September 2014 I wrote a Gravity Forms tutorial demonstrating how to implement a simple approval system for WordPress. The post generated a lot of interest and helped a lot of people roll their own.

It quickly became clear that people were starting to use my sample code without modification in their organisation for real workflow processes and this inevitably led to feature requests and bug fixes. So it prompted me to publish the add-on in the WordPress.org plugin repository – that way I could keep everyone up to date which is especially important should a security issue arise.

It turned out that a lot of the feature requests were way above and beyond what I was originally intending to provide as part of the tutorial and I realised that the Approvals Add-On just wasn’t going to cut it – I had to start from scratch to reach the level that was needed and it was not going to be a trivial project.

Fast forward one year later and Gravity Flow is now ready for beta testing by anyone who wants to try it. There are currently over 100 beta testers and I’d like to increase that to around 200 before the launch.

It’s currently available in English, French and Spanish.

The code is GPL open source of course, and available on GitHub. I’ll be charge yearly fees for access to support and automatic updates.

Here are some examples of processes that are currently being run on Gravity Flow.

• Contract review, feedback, modification and approval
• Medical supplies order process
• Employee vacation requests
• Purchase order approvals
• University admissions application processing
• Research experiment proposal feedback loop and approval
• Product order form approval
• Multi-level job application process
• ITIL-based Change Management Process
• Security change requests
• Student registration process

Who is it for?

Gravity Flow is for organisations and departments of any size that need to get a form-based workflow process up and running online quickly with no technical knowledge. These processes usually already exist either offline or online but are generally inefficiently implemented.

How does it work?

An end-user submits a form which generates an entry. The entry is then passed around between users and systems on an established path until the process is complete. Each user or system in the workflow will add something to the process before allowing the entry to proceed to the next step.

For example, an employee may add additional information and a manager another might add their approval.

You can add as many steps as you need as combine them in any order with conditional logic, scheduling, looping and branching.

Supported step types:

• Approval
• User Input
• Notification
• Webhook

Gravity Flow also integrates with the following Gravity Forms add-ons:

• User Registration Add-On
• Zapier Add-On
• MailChimp Add-On
• Emma Add-On

The auditing tools such as the timeline and the detailed activity log helps you keep track of the processes and the reporting provides a way to identify potential bottlenecks before they turn into an issue.

Further information and resources

• Visit the website
• Try the online demo
• Download the beta
• Take a look at the walkthroughs in the documentation
• Check out the source code
• Read the developer docs
• Get in touch and ask a question