You might have thought about controlling your users from the frontend and not to let login to the back office of your site. For this reason, there is handful of some plugins available to manage your task in the frontend. You might have googled for “wordpress frontend post editor plugin” or “wordpress frontend plugin” to checkout the available options.

After googling a bit, you will see that Gravity Forms and WP User Frontend is the most used and most popular plugin. But now you might get confused about User Frontend or Gravity Forms – What should I use?

So this post is for you decide which fits your needs.

WordPress has been remarkably loaded with features and functions that have played a vital role in allowing end users put their focus on performing tasks that require a special amount of time, efforts and dedication. The wide community of WordPress designers and developers has been tirelessly working on making the requested front-end features available to the global customer base of WordPress CMS (Content Management System). If you too are running a WordPress powered content-driven website then it’s beneficial for you to stay familiar with plugins that serve as high quality solutions for posting, editing and uploading content to the website right away using the front-end itself, without the need for understanding the WordPress dashboard. This blog helps you discover a lot about two finest front-end plugins for WordPress viz: User Frontend and Gravity Forms.

Firstly, let’s get to know the User Front-end Plugin better

An Overview

User Front-end is a WordPress plugin which allows you to restrict the access to your site’s admin panel. It providers users all the major functionality such as registration, login, profile management and logout within the site’s theme itself. The multisite-ready status of this WordPress plugin makes it the best fit for individuals/organizations which need to operate multiple WordPress powered websites simultaneously.

A brief on Installation

Its quite convenient to install and activate the WordPress User Front-end plugin in the well-known WordPress-ways. All you need to do is simply refresh the permalinks by going to Options-> Permalinks and finally clicking on ‘Save’ button. If you are a WordPress developer, then you can simply choose to copy the .php files from the ‘User Frontend’ plugin’s template folder to the active theme’s folder, followed by changing the markup in your own convenient way.

Links that’ll be using the WordPress User Front-end plugin

Once you’re done with installation and activation of WordPress User Front-end plugin, every user of your website will be redirected to specific page available in the front-end. Here’s a list of these pages:

Login page
A custom URL which serves handy for performing actions including updating of profiles etc.
The Profile Edit Page
The User Registration Page
The Reset Password Page
The Forgot Password Page
The User Activation Page

Web page styling is both convenient and fun with the ‘User Front-end’ plugin for WordPress

As explained previously that as a developer, you just need to copy the templates from /wp-content/plugins/user-frontend/templates/ to wp-content/themes/your-theme/. So, once you’re done with the copying part, you can proceed ahead with the web page editing part in a simple format.

And now, let’s come to the details of Gravity Forms plugin that’s available for WordPress powered websites

An Overview

As a premium WordPress plugin dedicated to web page forms, Gravity Forms allows you to effectively manage, distribute and connect all the forms that have been placed on your WordPress website. Whether it’s related to form completion, submission or receiving notifications, Gravity Forms take care of everything in a fabulous way.

A brief on Installation

Just like any other WordPress plugin, installing Gravity Forms plugin is also as simple as 1, 2,3. All you need to do is simply extract the zip file and drop the contents in the wp-content/plugins/directory of WordPress installation, followed by activating the plugin via the WordPress Plugins Page.

A brief on working of WordPress Gravity Forms Plugin

If you want to create a form using the Gravity Forms plugin, all you need to do is simply use the drag and drop interface. The form fields that you can include within the form are name, email id, address, CAPTCHA, drop-downs and many more. Simply fetch a particular form field, slide it over to the chosen form editor and finally choose to customize its value in the desired format. Plus, you can even avail the flexibility of setting up conditional logic, thereby displaying certain fields to only certain type of users.

Easy and quick integration with third-party applications is possible with Gravity Forms Plugin

You can efficiently extend the functionality of Gravity Forms plugin by integrating it with a large majority of popular web applications and third-party services including PayPal, Stripe, Campaign Monitor, AWeber and many more.

Advanced Features get introduced into Gravity Forms Plugin regularly

Ever since the year Gravity Forms plugin came into existence, a large number of advanced functionality have been introduced into the same. With the all-new added support for multi-page forms, Gravity Forms plugin allows you to set up multiple web page forms by simply adding a page break at the desired location. Also, there’s a progress indicator which provides an accurate feedback to the users regarding the area where they are during the form set up process.

Conclusion

So that was an informative insight into the key details regarding two very popular and in-demand WordPress Plugins viz: Gravity Forms and User Frontend. Hope by now you’d have got a vibe about the overall working and exclusiveness of both these Plugins for the benefit of WordPress website users.

Author Archives: celin smith

Best Frontend plugin for WordPress – User Frontend VS. Gravity Forms