We can hardly believe it but on July 24th, GravityView turned 7 years old! Back in 2014, after months of hard work, GravityView was released to the world.
Thank you to our wonderful customers, Gravity Forms, and the WordPress community. It’s our pleasure to provide powerful open-source software with active development and world-class support.
In this post, we’re taking a look back at the previous seven years to see how GravityView evolved from a simple idea into a powerful framework that is active on more than 20,000 websites.
2014-2015: Liftoff!🚀
GravityView officially launched on July 24th, 2014 after 8 months of hard work. After launch, it was full steam ahead as the team (originally Zack Katz and Luis Godinho) began working on new features and extensions. We added Edit Entry configuration, the Search Bar widget, and many other features based on user feedback.
One of the most important (and certainly the most fun) aspects of GravityView’s early growth was the introduction of Floaty as our company mascot. With that came the legendary “My Pal Floaty” music video produced by the one-and-only Jonathan Mann.
Less than a year after launch, GravityView had surpassed $100k in sales. By that time, we had already released 32 plugin updates and 7 premium extensions!
2016: Growing and Learning 📚
As GravityView’s user base grew, the team hired a new support lead, Rafael Ehlers. His patience and determination when providing support set the foundation for steady growth that has continued to this very day!
It was also time for another music video, featuring none other than Floaty the astronaut. Jonathan Mann took up the task again and produced the epic “Floaty loves the holidays” song. A warning to whoever clicks the link: this song is catchy!
The plugin updates kept rolling out as the team worked hard to add new features. In fact, the code was altered 717 times in 2016, averaging two updates every day! Some of the top features added during this time included the WordPress toolbar menu item and support for front-end entry notes.
2017: GravityView Gets a Major Upgrade 📈
In 2017, the team launched a new plugin – Inline Edit. Gravity Forms Inline Edit makes updating entries way faster. Data entry can be a slow and painful job and the team wanted to make it easier for people.
Another big milestone in 2017 was the release of the GravityView 2.0 Beta program. Version 2.0 was the result of thousands of hours of work. The team completely rewrote the engine to enhance the plugin’s functionality.
In GravityView’s third year of operation, more than 82,000 lines of code were added or removed from Core. Yes, eighty-two thousand!
2018: GravityView 2.0 Goes Live 🎉💻
2018 kicked off with a bang with the release of the DIY Layout. The GravityView DIY layout allows you to construct your own custom View layout using HTML and CSS. DIY adds extra flexibility for people comfortable with HTML and CSS but not wanting to customize templates using PHP.
In 2018, we released GravityView 2.0, the culmination of over 18 months of hard work! Although most of the changes were under the hood, a couple of new features also accompanied the release.
Vlad K. joined GravityView as a core developer. His technical expertise, attention to detail combined with persistence, and sense of humor all enhance the GravityView experience.
2019: Import Entries Gets a Power Boost ⚡️
One of the highlights in 2019 was a massive upgrade to the Import Entries plugin. Import Entries has always been the best way to import data. With Import Entries 2.0, we introduced our powerful new import flow that allows creating new forms, updating existing entries, or importing new entries to an existing form.
In 2019, we launched the GravityView Diversity Grant, sponsoring a new attendee at PressNomics 6 in Tuscon, Arizona. (Note: We will be bringing back the Diversity Grant once in-person events open back up!)
2020: Reflecting on GravityView’s Core Values 🌍
2020 was a year of reflection. The team had time to think about the company’s core values. And of course, who better to guide the company’s values than Floaty himself! Floaty is positive, humble, grateful, and trusting. Floaty embodies everything that GravityView stands for.
When the pandemic hit, one thing was clear: the world would be a scary and uncertain place. We were grateful for the WordPress community and wanted to share WordPress Strong – a collaboration between various members of the WordPress community. It’s a lot of fun, so check it out if you haven’t done so already.
We were honored to be included as one of the 6 initial members of the Gravity Forms Certified Developer program.
Finally, we capped off 2020 with the release of Gravity Guide – a new eLearning platform dedicated to providing high-quality Gravity Forms courses and tutorials. All courses on Gravity Guide are 100% free – it’s our gift to the Gravity Forms community!
Rafael Bennemann joined our support team! His kind personality and clear communication were a perfect fit.
2021: Onwards and Upwards 🙌🌟
And that brings us to this year, 2021 – a year that has seen GravityView reach a number of important milestones.
We launched GravityView 2.10, a huge update to our view editor that touched over 25,000 lines of code! The update included a new and improved field picker, a major update to the Custom Content field, and many more improvements. Other major releases included Math 2.0 and Gravity Forms Calendar 1.5.
At the beginning of the year, we took over the Gravity Forms Zero Spam plugin, making it easier for you to protect your website from spam submissions. We also acquired the GF Entries in Excel. An epic Pro version is coming soon!
Casey joined GravityView as Content Creator to help revamp our blog and ensure we’re producing top-class content for all of our users!
And finally, in a big milestone for us, GravityView surpassed 20,000 installs! It’s incredible to think of all the sites running GravityView plugins around the world. Software is a beautiful thing ❤️
Looking to the Future 🔭
It’s hard to believe that GravityView has been part of the Gravity Forms ecosystem for 7 years already! We’re so proud of what GravityView has helped users accomplish.
We will continue to focus on expanding what you can do with Gravity Forms while creating the best possible experience for our users. That’s our “North Star”. 🧭
2021 will bring more than one new plugin launch 🤫, the integration of TrustedLogin to make support a smoother experience, and a big branding update. 2021 will be a year for the books, so stay tuned! 😁
Here’s to the next 7 years. 🍻
Join Our Newsletter!📧🙌
✅ Helpful Gravity Forms content straight to your inbox
✅ Be the first to hear about new updates and releases