Gravity Forms is a wonderful plugin available to our network that allows site admin to create powerful forms that users can fill out. Part of the beauty of these forms is the powerful notification system. When a form is filled out you can have the input emailed to multiple email addresses.

I recently found out that Trello, a web application that acts like a Kanban, has the ability to create cards via email. This tutorial will go over how to configure Gravity Form notifications to automagically add cards to your board when someone fills out your form.

You’ll need an account on Trello.com and an ALC website with the Gravity Forms plugin activated (Go to Dashboard > Plugins to activate)

Outline

1. Create or select a Trello Board
2. Grab your secret email address
3. Create a new notification for a Gravity Form form
4. Add the secret Trello email as the send to email
5. Add merge tag values to the subject and message fields

Get the Trello email

Once you’ve created your Trello board navigate there:

Click the show menu button on the top right.

Click the More menu item.

Click the Email-to-board Settings.

Copy the email address they give you. It’s important to note that if anyone gains access to this address they can send cards to your board, so don’t share it! Then set the list and position the card will appear in when it’s emailed to Trello.

You are now done with the Trello side of things, let’s navigate over to our ALC website (or any WordPress site with Gravity Forms)

From your Dashboad find the Forms menu item, click it and select the form you wish to send notifications from, I’ve selected a contact form. Now go to Form Settings > Notifications to see a list of the notification that are attached to that particular form. Click Add New to start building out the trello card notification.

Paste in the Trello email address from earlier into the Send to Email field. If you don’t see this field make sure the Send To radio button (round white dot) next to Enter Email is selected.

Now for the fun part, we need to configure how the data from the form will show up in the Trello card. You can use the following links for reference:

• Trello Markdown documentation – Trello cards accept Markdown syntax to style the text on cards.
• Gravity Forms Merge Tags – Merge tags allow you to put place holder text that represents data from the form as well as other variables such as submission date.

You can select merge tags using the marked buttons in the above picture. Anything you put in the Message area shows up in the description of the card while the text in the Subject area is placed in the title of the Trello card. I suggest playing with the Markdown syntax in a test card then transferring it to the Gravity Form notification and adding merge tags like you see above.

Once you are done setting it up hit save, test the form and allow about 15 minutes for the card to show up on Trello. After that you’re done!

If you want to take this to the next level you can use different user accounts to create different email address that can then be sent to based on conditional settings on the Gravity Forms. Let me know how this works for you in the comments!