How to Easily Display Users’ Form Entries on Your LifterLMS Powered Website

Do your users submit forms that you want to show on your LifterLMS Student Dashboard? Join Zack Katz, creator of GravityView, as he shows you how to display users’ forms entries on your site and make them editable. You will find out how to make your users’ form submissions more useful than ever before!

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Display Student Form Entries on Your LifterLMS Site With GravityView

Chris Badgett sits down with Zach Katz of GravityView to reveal a new GravityView LifterLMS integration and walk through how course creators can display student form entries on the front end of a WordPress LMS. Watch to see how to build directories, private student dashboards, coaching notes, mindfulness checklists, personality quizzes, and progress charts using Gravity Forms and GravityView inside LifterLMS.

What You’ll Learn

• How Gravity Forms and GravityView work together to turn student submissions into front-end content.
• How the new GravityView LifterLMS integration adds a My Form Entries tab to the student dashboard.
• How to display prior student responses inside a lesson to spark discussion and social learning.
• How to build private coaching workflows where each student only sees their own entries and notes.
• How to layer add-ons like GF Chart, Gravity Math, and Gravity Perks for charts, calculations, and per-day entry limits.

Key Takeaways

• Treat every form as a data source you can display later, not a one-time contact form.
• Use GravityView entry approval so student submissions are moderated before they go public.
• Set view visibility to the currently logged in user when a student should only see their own data.
• Reach for GF Chart when a student needs to see their progress over time on the dashboard.
• Nest a second form inside a view when you need a coach and a student to see different fields on the same entry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Forms Are the Foundation of a WordPress LMS Site

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this complimentary training. I’m Chris Badgett from LifterLMS and I have a very special guest. His name is Zach Katz, he’s from GravityView, which in a nutshell allows you to display your Gravity Forms entries in creative ways on the front end of the website. That is a big part of a learning management system. We’re often collecting data from people, whether it’s some kind of certification, or coaching, or personal development. There are a lot of different ways data comes in as part of the training, or even just allowing people to easily submit testimonials and display them on the front end, or customize the student dashboard so people are slowly building or updating something and have that data displaying.

Zach Katz: Thanks Chris. Hi everybody, hi LifterLMS world.

Chris Badgett: One reason I personally use Gravity Forms is that I’ve been around WordPress a long time. Gravity Forms is one of the most popular form plugins, and it has the most integrations, so there are people like Zach building cool tools on top of it. That’s what has kept me in the Gravity Forms ecosystem for eight, nine, ten years now. Zach, one way to just start is if you could bring us in on the wedge. What is a form, and why is a form so fundamental to every website?

What Gravity Forms Actually Does

Zach Katz: A form is a way to collect data, and that could be any type of data. Think of the components. A contact form gathers a name, an email address, a phone number, and maybe a comment box. So what do you do with that data once the form is submitted? In the old days before Gravity Forms, the form would be submitted, you would get an email that said this person contacted you, and that was it. You had to follow up. You did not have any record other than that email.

Gravity Forms came along and allowed you to store those entries in your website database, so they are no longer just ephemeral, no longer just an email. Each field gets stored, so the name, the email, uploaded files, everything gets stored on your website. You can come back and review it, add notes to each entry, say I followed up with this person, and you have a record of all this stuff.

Gravity Forms also connects to other services. When someone submits the form, instead of just an email, you can say hey, by the way, add this to Google Sheets. Turn on my HomeKit light bulb. You can do whatever you want. If you have a contact form where people can turn your house lights on and off, that would probably get messy, but it is possible.

So a form can be anything you want. It could be, I am running this gym and I want people to track their reps and their mindful minutes. You may experience that as an app on your phone, but you can integrate that same functionality on your website by setting up a form and deciding what kind of data you are trying to collect.

How GravityView Turns Entries Into Front-End Content

Zach Katz: With Gravity Forms you collect the data and it is visible when you log into the back end of your WordPress site. With GravityView, you can take those entries and configure which fields are visible, so only the fields you want to be public can be seen publicly. It turns Gravity Forms from a tool for the site administrator into a way to gather data from the public or from your users and display it back to them or to the public on your website. So it is not just gathering data for you, it is using the data for your site in a way that had not been possible before.

GravityView lets you approve entries before they are visible, so it is not just automatically getting spammed. You can also set up search tools so people can browse the submitted data, and it becomes a directory. Now it is no longer just a contact form or a testimonial form that comes in and forces you to copy and paste the testimonial onto a static page. You can have the testimonial directly populate the testimonials page once you approve it.

GravityView really turns Gravity Forms into an app builder. What kind of data do you want to gather, and what kind of data do you want to display on your site? That is what GravityView can help you deal with.

How Gravity Forms Compares to Ninja Forms

Chris Badgett: Someone is asking, how does Gravity Forms compare to Ninja Forms?

Zach Katz: Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms have been around for a long time. Short answer, it comes down to preference. You can achieve similar things with both tools. Ninja Forms, from what I understand, is less cost-effective if you are doing a powerful kit with all the add-ons and integrations. I just love Gravity Forms and the ease of integrating and building on top of it. As a third party it has been very easy to do, and it really empowers a bunch of people to build on top of it. The ecosystem around Gravity Forms is a lot stronger than the ecosystem around Ninja Forms, in my opinion.

One of the nice things is anytime you need anything customized with Gravity Forms, it is possible because they have tons of hooks and filters. You can modify whatever you want. And you can go on a site like Codeable and say, hey, I want to do this with Gravity Forms. So many people have experience with Gravity Forms that finding a professional who can help you is really easy. As a user it is easy to use, as a developer it is easy to use, and their support is top-notch. I am on team Gravity Forms all the way.

Building a Certified Coach Directory From Gravity Forms Entries

Zach Katz: Data can be collected by designing the form. In Gravity Forms you decide what fields to add. Text fields, paragraph text, address fields, the standard form fields. When someone submits that information, in GravityView you can choose to display it in different ways, like a table. The fields on the form become columns in the table. You can sort by those fields, you can filter, and you can search. Say we know the name of the business. You search and find it, then click through to a single entry and see additional details that you did not want to show on the public directory. So you can have one view with multiple entries all shown at once, then narrow down and click through to see the details.

Chris Badgett: Before we hit record we were talking about some use cases. You could use that for a certified coach directory?

Zach Katz: Absolutely. We actually developed GravityView based on a client need six years ago. The client was trying to create a directory of animal doctors, and those doctors wanted a way to show that they were certified, that they had completed different training, and to have their contact details visible. So we created GravityView to display the entry data that was collected with Gravity Forms.

That is a table layout. You can also use the same data to populate a different type of layout, more like a Yelp listing, where the name is up top, you have headings and additional text, and phone numbers you can click to call directly on mobile. All of it is powered by the same data being gathered in Gravity Forms.

Chris Badgett: I see people do this all the time. They pass a certification course, and if you are using the LifterLMS approach where the final lesson is only accessible after you pass the test, once you are certified you can input your listing for the coach directory. You have just made it all possible with no custom development at all. And you can have featured listings, so if people want to pay for additional functionality in the directory, that is all possible out of the box with GravityView.

Introducing the GravityView LifterLMS Integration

Zach Katz: Today is the big reveal day of a new GravityView LifterLMS integration. You will be the first ones worldwide to see this. Let’s say you have a LifterLMS course, and in the course you have integrated with Gravity Forms. You have a leadership lesson with a Gravity Forms form embedded in it as part of the lesson assignments, so when you complete the lesson by submitting the form you go to the next lesson.

That data can now be used inside LifterLMS. Say you have a group assignment where people share ideas, like what is your spirit animal. You might want to get their juices flowing with some ideas, so you can show prior respondents right on that lesson page.

Showing Prior Student Responses Inside a Lesson

Zach Katz: On this leadership lesson, someone has already filled out a form about their type of leadership. You watch the video and get inspired, and the lesson author says, synthesize what you have learned and share it with the rest of us. You do that by embedding a Gravity Forms form in your lesson, and that becomes part of the assignment.

With GravityView you can choose to share specific entries from the same lesson by embedding a GravityView shortcode. Gutenberg blocks are coming as well. I embedded a shortcode here that shows approved submissions from that form. So now the lesson is not just about completing it and moving on. Other students’ responses are part of the lesson itself.

On the back end there have been multiple submissions and only one has been approved, which is the one you just saw on the lesson page. I as the site administrator see the other submissions coming in. I say okay, I like this one, I am going to approve it for site-wide visibility. Refresh the lesson and the new entry is there too. There is a layer of moderation, so if somebody comes in on your testimonial and spams it, it does not have to automatically go live. On a members-only site you might choose not to moderate, since only your students are submitting.

Adding a My Form Entries Tab to the Student Dashboard

Zach Katz: That is all inside the lesson, but what about site-wide? LifterLMS has a student dashboard, and GravityView now has a world premiere LifterLMS integration called My Form Entries. This shows the entries the student has submitted, and each row links directly to the lesson where they submitted it.

Chris Badgett: That is cool. This ties into a question about a table with pictures or other richer data.

Zach Katz: They could be pictures, they could be anything. I am doing the table just for display, but you can output any type of layout. To wire this up in LifterLMS, we have added a tab under Integrations for GravityView, and you can point it at a view. In that view I set visibility to only show entries created by the currently logged in user, which addresses the privacy concern that came up earlier. That is how you make this not a privacy issue.

You are not limited to a table called My Form Entries. It could be called My Meditation Record, or whatever fits the course. It could show minutes over time, and you can integrate it with GF Chart, an add-on that displays entries as charts, so a student sees their minutes charted on a timeline.

Building a DIY HTML Layout for a Movie Log

Chris Badgett: That is very standard because of the table layout. What other funky things can you do? Let’s get funky.

Zach Katz: Say you want to collect the movies you have watched. This is powered by GravityView and our DIY layout. If you know HTML and CSS and you say, I just want to loop over the form entries and show this HTML for each one, GravityView lets you do that. You configure the HTML for each entry, you can show any of the field data, and it works with Masonry so it resizes based on the screen. You can see the name and year of the film on the tile, and clicking through shows the genre, director, and IMDb rating. The form connected to it captures the movie details and an upload field for the movie poster.

Chris Badgett: If I was doing a fitness training course and I wanted students to take a selfie and type in their mileage, I could start building out a workout history like this.

Zach Katz: Exactly. You can take that one form and make a bunch of views out of it. Have a selfie gallery on one page, an inspirational quote of the moment, then a database-style view that shows reps and food. You can also connect multiple views together on a common field, like the user ID or email, so one form gathers workout history, another gathers food history, and both feed one dashboard.

Coach Notes on a One-on-One Coaching Client

Chris Badgett: Say I am a coach, I have a website, and I am taking notes during one-on-one coaching calls. I want those notes to show up on the dashboard for that coaching client. It is not student-submitted, it is website-submitted. Is there a way to make that happen?

Zach Katz: Absolutely. Any form. You can nest forms inside views inside forms inside views. You can create these powerful applications. So as a coach you have one form where only certain fields are visible to the coach and other fields are visible to the student. You use one form and have two different layouts for two different people. Each person only sees the layout that is meant for them. They would never see each other’s notes.

Committee Review of a Final Student Project

Zach Katz: We have a lot of people in education where a student submits a form for their end-of-year art project, then a whole committee of professors comes in to review it and decide whether the project passes and the student graduates. One student submits an entry, and dozens of professors come in and say okay, I like this, I think this student should go forward.

The student submits the form, that gets shown in GravityView, and inside the view there is another form where all the professors submit their feedback. So you connect two different forms together with GravityView. That is a common use case.

Connecting Gravity Forms to WP Fusion, Zapier, and Infusionsoft

Chris Badgett: There is another comment. If somebody submits the form, can I connect it to Infusionsoft through WP Fusion? Gravity Forms has WP Fusion integration and Gravity Forms integrates with WP Fusion, so regardless of whether you are using GravityView or not, you are covered there.

Zach Katz: Absolutely, and Zapier too. I actually made the Gravity Forms Infusionsoft plug-in originally. I no longer control it, but I developed it, so that is out there as well. Can I connect Gravity Forms to XYZ? Yes, absolutely. I guarantee there is a way to connect Gravity Forms to pretty much anything.

Collecting Signatures on Coaching Agreements

Chris Badgett: Sometimes coaches need to get a client to sign something at the beginning. I know Gravity Forms has a signature thing. Can GravityView display that signature?

Zach Katz: Absolutely. Gravity Forms has a signature field, and I believe they also integrate with DocuSign. Regardless, they have a signature field, and GravityView can show the signature. GravityView can also hide content based on the type of submission, so if one radio button in a form is checked, show this stuff, and if another one is checked, show something else. You can build a dynamic output based on what the form is filled out with, so you can cater the display to the person or the level of course they are in.

Live-Building a Mindfulness Checklist Form

Chris Badgett: Dale is asking how you would build a daily practice tracker with three exercises they do daily. Can you think out loud on that?

Zach Katz: Let me create a new form in Gravity Forms called Mindfulness. I want checkboxes for the different things I want checked off, so I add a checkboxes field. The first item is sit still for five minutes without looking at your phone. The second is be conscious of your breath for five minutes. That is not a good list but it is a decent starter. So I call the field Meditation Checklist and add my three items.

Dale also wants to know how you can show that this happens daily. Gravity Forms already captures when the entry was created, so I do not need a date field. The student will be logged in, so I do not need a name or email field either. Gravity Forms already knows who is logged in.

Chris Badgett: What if they wanted to add a picture? A meditation selfie.

Zach Katz: Great, let’s add a file upload field, and restrict the uploads to JPEG, PNG, and SVG. You can limit the type of uploads so people doing mindfulness cannot upload zip files. Now we have a form. In the preview it is a checklist and an upload field for a picture of yourself meditating.

Limiting Entries and Restricting the Form to Logged-In Users

Zach Katz: In the form settings you can go to Limit Number of Entries and set it per day. One entry per day is global for the form, not per user, and that is where Gravity Perks, a third-party add-on for Gravity Forms, comes in. You can also restrict the form to only show for the month of August, for a mindful month challenge, and only show it to logged-in users even if the page is public.

Chris Badgett: That is nice for a promo too. If you ever wanted to send an email to your students, the first twenty people who leave a review get a bonus.

Zach Katz: Absolutely. Gravity Forms is an awesome way to run giveaways like that, and GravityView can display those submissions. If people submit tweets, you can use GravityView to display the embedded tweets. Let’s say we want one entry per day and the message Entry limit reached, great job, you’ve done it.

Creating the View and Adding Coach Notes to Each Entry

Zach Katz: Now that we have the form and an entry, let’s create a view to show that submission. I create a table view. Tabular data is a good fit for a time series. I choose to show the meditation checklist, but rather than showing the three checkboxes in one column, I set each one as its own column because that reads more cleanly. I add the entry date and leave the default date format.

The view first says no entries match your request. That is because entries are not approved by default. I go to view settings, uncheck Show only approved entries, update, and refresh. Now the entry is visible, exactly what Dale was looking for.

Next step: I am the mindfulness coach and I want to leave notes and positive affirmations. I add a table column and search for the entry notes option. This is the entry notes feature inside GravityView, similar to the Gravity Forms functionality. You can configure whether the notes are public or only allow adding them. That means one of the entry notes could be a private note only visible to the coach and student, or a public one. I add a note that says great job meditating, I missed the picture, frowny face. Refresh and it appears. If the form has an email field, it will be emailed to that address, or you can hard-code the email address to send every note to the coach.

Getting Help With Gravity Forms and GravityView

Chris Badgett: If you are anything like me, it took me a long time to figure out forms and how to put all this together. You can always get help. Zach mentioned Codeable. There is also the LifterLMS experts page. If you like what you are seeing but it feels like a lot to put together on your own, this is not a bunch of code, this is configuring plugins. Any WordPress freelancer worth their salt is going to know their way around Gravity Forms.

Zach Katz: Our support team is here every workday. We have two people dedicated to support, and they help you say, well, this is one thing you can do to achieve your goal. LifterLMS is trying to democratize learning, and we are trying to democratize what you can do with Gravity Forms entries on the front of the website. We have a 30-day guarantee. Try GravityView, get in touch with support right away, tell us what you are trying to do, and we will help you along the way.

Tracking Business Results Over Time on the Student Dashboard

Chris Badgett: I have another use case for you. There is a feature I have wanted in LifterLMS for four or five years. A lot of training is designed around a result. A business course might be about making more money. A health course might be about losing weight. A relationships course might be about how satisfied you are with your partner. If we want students updating those metrics over time as they progress through the course, and we want them to see that data visualized ideally on the student dashboard, how do we do that?

Zach Katz: GF Chart is the charting plug-in I recommend for Gravity Forms, and it is great for exactly that. You can show pie charts for how satisfied people are, and as the course creator you can see visual representations of those polls. For a business use case, GravityView has a Math extension where you can sum and perform calculations on the entry data. So you can say, for all of the submissions by this user add up to $1.2 million, and you can show that number at the top, embed it wherever you want, and make it giant on the home page if you want.

Weighted Answers and Personality Quizzes

Chris Badgett: Dale is asking about weighted answers to multiple-choice questions.

Zach Katz: Gravity Forms has a Quiz add-on with weighted answers. In a math quiz for example, there might be one question that is more important than another. You can say, if the student understands this, it counts for far more than if they understand that.

Chris Badgett: And what about scoring like a personality quiz, where there is no right or wrong answer but each choice is worth a certain number of points, and the total maps to a result?

Zach Katz: Gravity Forms can do that, and GravityView can do that too. Which character from Friends are you, that sort of thing. Based on the total you land on a personality result. Gravity Forms has a checkbox on choice fields called Enable Values, where each text choice can carry a numeric value. Add the values up and you can do whatever you want with the total.

Using an NPS Score to Tag Students in ActiveCampaign

Zach Katz: I use Gravity Forms for my Net Promoter Score survey. Depending on how someone rates their experience with GravityView, it triggers different follow-up sequences. If they rate it badly I want to know, and if they rate it well I want to know too. Different responses go into different lists.

Chris Badgett: Can you take an NPS response and pass it through WP Fusion, so I can tag customers in ActiveCampaign based on their feedback?

Zach Katz: Yes. You can tag customers based on their feedback. The Net Promoter Score theory says on a scale of zero to ten, the eights, nines, and tens are your promoters. Sevens and sixes are neutral. Anyone lower is a detractor. You can tag people accordingly in ActiveCampaign, then route them to the right follow-up.

Merging Multiple Forms Into One Business Dashboard

Chris Badgett: Multiple forms filling out one singular giant view. If we are going through a training and entering little pieces of data through several forms along the way, by the end can we have one document or dashboard that assembles all of that?

Zach Katz: Yes. You can merge workout data and food data into one view on a common field. You can build your own dashboard. Think about a business model canvas. In lesson one you look at your target market, in lesson two you look at another quadrant, and eventually the site spits out a view of your business. You have a form asking for your quarterly target, more questions based on your business, and that form gets filled out each quarter for planning the next one. Then GravityView shows all of it in a dashboard. If you know CSS to lay it out nicely, you can show each entry as one of those business dashboard charts.

Where GravityView Fits in the LifterLMS Ecosystem

Zach Katz: When it comes to form gathering, I recommend Gravity Forms, and when it comes to displaying data, GravityView. With LifterLMS and GravityView you can do so much. GravityView can fill in a lot of the gaps where you say, I want to do this with LifterLMS but it is not quite available. You have assignments, courses, and other pieces, and GravityView can paste in the little pieces that complete the application for people who are building LMS solutions.

Chris Badgett: My technical co-founder Thomas used to say, that is just a form, that is just a form, and then we have to do something with the data. Once you really get it, there is no end to what you can do. A LifterLMS site is a web application, not a static content site, and part of what makes an application is the interaction between the user and the site creator, or between users. Forms are the bridge between all of that.

Closing Thoughts on WordPress as an App Platform

Chris Badgett: I did not even know before this call that we had a new GravityView LifterLMS integration coming out. This is the beauty of the WordPress community, and it is the point of coming over from a hosted LMS or a hosted course platform. You can buy expensive software that does all of this and charges you a monthly fee, but it is not flexible. You cannot combine it, you cannot bring in somebody to tweak it. We have a customer who is saving $30,000 a year by using Gravity Forms, GravityView, and WordPress instead of a hosted solution.

Zach Katz: WordPress is a little harder to drive and comes with a little more responsibility, but when you get the right tools together, it is amazing what you can do. And you are not locked in.

Chris Badgett: Zach, thank you very much for coming. Thank you to everyone watching. If you need any of the links, we put them in the chat. It is great to be with you on the journey.