Gravity Forms 3.0 Introduces Exciting New Feature Where Input Masks Become the Input
WordPress administrators nationwide celebrated this week after upgrading to Gravity Forms 3.0 and discovering that the plugin’s new input-masking system has dramatically streamlined the form-building process by simply displaying the mask itself to users.
“Before, when we entered 9?99, customers could type a number between one and three digits,” said one website administrator foolish enough to believe that functionality would continue. “Now the field proudly says 9?99 right inside the box. Much more transparent.”
The innovation arrives after Gravity Forms replaced the masking library that had successfully handled existing forms for years.
Company officials reportedly reassured users that the question mark remains fully supported, provided customers understand that “supported” can occasionally mean “visibly printed into the form like an ancient rune.”
The upgrade has been especially welcomed by organizations with hundreds of existing masked fields.
“I was worried I might have something productive to do today,” said one developer managing 400 product quantity fields. “Thankfully, a major plugin update has given me the opportunity to individually revisit configuration decisions I made seven years ago.”
Phone masks such as (999) 999-9999 reportedly continue functioning normally, further enhancing the debugging experience by making the problem just inconsistent enough to ruin an entire afternoon.
Gravity Forms experts have recommended several possible solutions, including disabling the masks, rebuilding the fields, changing field types, writing custom JavaScript, rolling back the plugin, filing a support ticket, sacrificing a USB cable under a full moon, or simply explaining to customers that 9?99 is the quantity they ordered.
At press time, the Gravity Forms documentation continued to describe ? as the character used to designate optional portions of a mask, leading developers to conclude that the documentation and the JavaScript library are currently “taking some time apart.”
Gravity Forms 3.1 is expected to introduce another major usability improvement in which conditional logic conditions are displayed directly to customers as PHP arrays.