We launched GravityView three years ago!
In this post, we celebrate the journey GravityView has “launched” us on đ and talk about new features and functionality planned in the next year. I also go over our new renewal process and why we switched. Three years ago, we created GravityView because our clients needed a way to display their Gravity Forms entries on their websites. Although there were some options out there, none of them provided the suite of functions our customers wanted. And, as one of our customers recently told us, custom solutions are very expensive:
âMy developers all told me that for what I was proposing, it would be in the 20 week region just to get the basic functionality up together.âŚI installed Gravity Forms and GravityView and had put together a perfectly working model within 5 hours with only 10 lines of PHP code involved!â – Chris L., July 2017
We frequently hear from customers that GravityView makes their lives easier and increases their productivity. We rely on our customer feedback to identify important new features and improve existing features. In the past year, we’ve made huge strides to improve our customer experience and provide added functionality. Here are some highlights:
Customer support: Rafael is a top-notch support artist!
Rafael is providing responsive, detail-oriented support, helping 1,335 customers in the past year alone. Support can be challengingâtrying to understand complex processes through email is no easy featâbut Rafael is patient and determined when solving problems. Thanks to Rafael for his attitude and attention đ and for our customers being genuinely nice people! That’s not always the case, but we happen to have the best customers đ
Plugin Development: Gennady puts his skills to work for GravityView
Gennady Kovshenin started working with us on GravityView in December 2016. Heâs been doing an incredible job reworking the internals of the plugin, and itâs wonderful to have him as part of the team. Here at GravityView we care about the quality of our codebase. Gennady has a special talent for identifying areas for improvement and writing new, better code. Our focus on plugin code improvement resulted in big statistics: Â In the past year, we averaged 14.08 changes to GravityView per week. That represents over 730 commits to GravityView in the last year and 429 files changed. We added 82,627 lines of code and deleted 38,608 lines of code. Yes, we keep track of these things!
Proud to announce Version 2.0
A rewrite of GravityViewâs core.
Gennady has been laser-focused on taking GravityView’s engine and upgrading each part while the engine still runs. This takes careful planning. For each function Gennadyâs been enhancing, he’s taken great care to make sure GravityView works as expected. The means:
- Creating and running lots of tests to validate how GravityView currently works
- Rewriting the function to use the new “engine”
- Running the original tests to make sure GravityView works as it should
This process has been repeated hundreds of times, and with Version 2.0, nearly every part of the engine that runs GravityView has been rewritten from scratch. Interested? Learn more about the code changes. The GravityView 2.0 beta will be released this week. You can opt-in by going to GravityView Settings page and checking the âBecome a Beta Testerâ box. When it is released, youâll see the update on your Plugins page. We hope you love the new powerful developer tools and improved speed! Meanwhile, we also released the Gravity Forms Inline Edit stand-alone plugin. This plugin is awesome and solves an annoying process for our customers by allowing users to quickly edit entries. We timed it, it is 340% faster than existing entry edit options!
Changing from annual product licenses to subscription renewals
The subscription economy is here. For many companies, switching from a product-based approach to a subscription-based model provides new growth opportunities while allowing for price adaptation to changing consumer price preferences. For GravityView, moving to a subscription model serves a number of goals.
- License renewals is one of our most common support issues. Subscriptions takes the hassle out of license renewalsâit will save everyone a lot of time.
- Subscriptions will lock in the license price, allowing customers to budget and plan for future expenses.
- By enabling subscriptions, we will increase our annual renewal rates thereby providing GravityView with a more steady and predictable income stream. Stability allows us to continue investing in our productâwhether it be in hiring new staff to develop new functionality, provide support, and enhance our documentation.
- Another huge anticipated benefit of subscriptions is that more people will be running the most recent version of our plugin because they will be up to date in their subscription. This will reduce customer support, customer frustration with bugs, and provide customers with instant access to our constantly evolving suite of plugins and functionality.
If you have any questions about these changes, please refer to our support site or email us with questions at [email protected].
Whatâs coming in the next year?
Weâre now focused on taking GravityView to the next level, with features like displaying entries from multiple forms in a single View and advanced entry search functionality. Weâll be share more about this in the coming months!